Me and a Table Part Ways

Today, I donated to a local non-profit an eight-foot folding table
that was sitting in our soon-to-be dining room but had no place in our
future decorating scheme. Big deal, right? Well, after the table was
taken away, my wife asked me, "Did you cry?" For you see, this table
and I go quite a ways back.

The table was actually owned by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship on
the PENN campus. It was used at the beginning of the school year, set
up at a busy intersection with Bibles and pamphlets and a sign-up
sheet, and staffed by rotations of fellowship members eager to talk to
passersby about joining the group. Because it was littered with
various Christian books, it became known as "the IV Book Table." I
don't know if I ever visited the IV Book Table myself my freshman year
– I got plugged into the fellowship through a friend of a friend – but
I certainly spent my share on the other side of the table my
sophomore, junior, and senior years. Those were times of
anticipation, of good conversations with people on the other side of
the table, and of catching up with whoever was paired with me on the
same side of the table.

The table itself was retired from its purpose after my senior year,
when it was decided that a lighter card table was easier to lug around
than a metal folding table. By then, I was a volunteer staff member
for PENN IV, living in the senior staff members' house with four other
full-time or volunteer staff. There were four male staffers including
me, and we only had one big room and one small room at our disposal.
Since we only used our bedrooms for sleeping, we decided to move our
four desks into the big room. Now we just had to figure out how to
get four beds and four dressers into the one small room. Enter the
eight-foot folding table. Laid flat across two dressers, I could
sleep on top of it and another person could sleep underneath it. A
bunk bed took care of the other two gents, and we were good to go.

Several years later, after the senior staffers had left PENN IV and
moved away, I was among a group of people commissioned to clean their
house after it was sold. We were told we could take anything in it
that we wanted, and I called dibs on the eight-foot table. It was
moved into the house I had just bought with my wife, and it served as
our first desk – we sat side-by-side. Later, we moved it to our guest
room so that guests would have ample room to put their belongings.

But our guest room became a baby room last year, and so we had to move
the table out into the dining room. And when the dining room got
repainted earlier this month in preparation for buying a dining room
table, something we have been without for five-plus years in this
house now, we decided it was time to get rid of the table.

I laughed when Amy asked me if I cried as the table was living our
house and my possession. But then I thought about it and I told her
that indeed I was a little sad that this table, which I had had so
many good memories with and which I had slept on and which I had
lugged around to so many different places, wasn't mine anymore.