The linguine boils happily beside the meatballs and vegetables in tomato sauce while just below them, the garlic bread warms up in the oven. On top of the water cooler, the salad waits beside the baggie of parmesan cheese, both out of the reach of the dog who will eat everything. In one bedroom, Natalie watches “House of Cards” while multi-tasking on music business stuff. In another, Daniel naps, and in the basement, Forest does things involving Reddit that I can’t quite comprehend. But the kitchen table is relatively clean, and soon they will pour around it along with Ken for our Sabbath dinner.
It’s been awhile. With everyone’s varied schedules, our young adult children living far away or moving back in for short stretches, and the general morphing of families dinners into catch-while-catch-can, we don’t get to do this much. Years ago, when the children were children, Sabbath dinners were the norm, complete with a healthy dose of sarcasm as the sweetheart babies and toddlers turns into Simpsons-quoting tweens and teens. Our regular ritual of having each person at the table say something they appreciate about everyone else turned into a chance to say things like, “I appreciate my brother for not being such a big jerk all the time this week.” Still, it was a ritual, and rituals have their power for marking off one time from another and bonding people, even in bad jokes and thinly-veiled insults.
Moreover, the Sabbath is about slowing down and savoring time, place, people, and obviously, food. This is something that continually challenges me to step gingerly over the fence of being a fierce do-er of many things to the land of being. The first few steps always feel a little shaky, but then I fall back in love with watching the sky, writing by hand in my journal, read a book with a cat asleep on me or walk with the dog. Of course, I do slip off into my computer and associated work here and there, but over time I’m tilting more toward this slowing down for a few hours or minutes or even part of a day.
Just as I’m about to close this post and drain the pasta, Ken calls: he’s running late and tells us to go ahead and eat. No, I tell him, we’ll wait.
