The dining room
Europe’s dining rooms are more elaborate than America’s where design experts insist the formal dining room is dead. It no longer fits our on-the-go lifestyle, they say. That may be true. Even in my dining room proper, things are not necessarily elegant or traditional. I have set up a home office in one corner of my dining room because I like working in the heart of my home. Here you’ll find everything from a fax machine to my mother’s flowered teacups. Stainless-steel desk accessories are shadowed by tall indoor palms rising out of corners. Hung on opposite walls are a painting of red shoes (a personal metaphor for me, as for Dorothy of Oz, of a woman’s energy in the world) and a print of Marc Chagall’s Jerusalem skyline. My beat-up computer takes center stage on the desk, while just a few feet away a cloisonne Italian chandelier hangs above the table. Here, my “devotee of femininity and tradition” self coexists with my “gypsy and lover of whimsy” seW
S till, the dining table, although no longer associated with propriety and primness, is the place where we sit up straight. In this room as in no other, we make intentional connection on a regular basis. It is where we look each other in the eye because we are centered around a common essential activity; If you believe that every time someone looks you in the eye, he or she is asking, “Do you love me?” you may find the answer to this unspoken question at the dinner table.
After all, a meal is a respite from the cares of the day, the wounds of enemies, the playground of our lives, the grueling work that is our livelihood. Whether it’s breakfast in a nook or a grand buffet dinner, the atmosphere in which we eat is layered with nuances of spirituality—the storms weathered, the waves ridden.