If I had to guess how many people have sat and conversed around my mom and dad’s dining room table on West 27^th Street in Kearney, Nebraska, I would guess the number to be in the thousands. And if I polled those thousands about the comfort level of the chairs that surround that table, I would guess that that level would be -10 (with 1 being barely tolerable and 10 being heavenly). Suffice it say, these are not comfortable chairs.

So what holds people in wooden chairs that could moonlight as torture devices? (O.K., this may be a bit melodramatic and wholly unfair to chairs that have held many fine derrières for years.) What holds us? Good talk. The best talk imaginable.

When I consider my education—my true and enduring education—I know that it has developed slowly and surely over the course of dining room table conversations with family and friends. Long after the last slice of pie has been served and the ice has melted in our glasses, the talk consumes us. In the next room, the television and its white noise are merely a backdrop for the colors at the table: scarlet words that wrestle with the politics of the day; celadon words of new ideas that, once spoken, burst forth and take flight; gray woolen words of assurance, like sweaters of comfort, that affirm speakers and listeners alike; and, suspended on wisps of vermillion and amethyst, golden words of wisdom that float high above the oval table. These are colors and words for the ages.

Around this table, I grew into and out of myself. I tested fledgling theories and propositions, I shaped infant ideas, I challenged and countered others, I floundered and, at times, crashed and burned. Around my family’s table, it was difficult—if not impossible—to take yourself too seriously, for there were always those to humble you in love.

If family and friends came to this table for my mother’s cooking and hospitality, they also came for my father’s tutelage. Spending an evening in the sanctuary of our dining room table is much like eating the best cheesy potatoes while sitting at the feet of Socrates. You leave with a full belly, mind, and soul. And who could want for more?

In “A Poet in Residence at a Country School,” my father writes of a young boy who struggles to begin writing. He approaches my dad and “wonders today, at least, if he just couldn’t sit on my lap.” In the final stanza of the poem, we read:

And so the two of us sit under a clock,                                                           beside a gaudy picture of a butterfly                                                           and a sweet poem of Christina Rosetti’s.                                                     And in all that silence, neither of us can                                                         imagine where he’d rather be.

In the sanctuary of this table, my parents have taken us all in: those they know and love and those they do not yet know or love. They have sheltered us all beneath their merciful wings, and none can imagine where he’d rather be.