Farm Table Conversations and More

On an average day, when there are no lectures going on, there are around twenty-five out of the seventy-five people living in my Independent Living complex that I interact with. That includes brief "hellos" in the common areas and the most popularly asked and answered question: "Has Jesse (our mail carrier) been here yet?" Me, I'm more interested in if the Amazon driver has made one of its two stops a day but I rarely have to ask because I can see their truck coming and going from my window. Between them, UPS, Fed-x and USPS our mail room is always full of boxes and puffy bags in all sizes and shapes. We seniors have learned the fine art of online shopping. 

One of my six hall mates has appointed himself the package delivery person on my floor so I rarely have to retrieve an expected delivery. Another guy on the floor tried to give him a hundred dollars in a Christmas card for the mail-room-to-door service but he gave it back. By contrast I gave him a Valentine's Day card with a thank you message inside and a few pieces of Nutella. (The card idea pre-approved by his wife, of course.) Big tipper guy owns a company that makes high school and college class rings and he has two houses and one of biggest apartments in the building. Even though he lives across from me the only time I see him is in the parking garage where our cars are parked side by side. He's always coming or going from the airport and when he's gone lots of packages and the Wall Street Journal build up at his door. Except for his name, you now know as much about him as I do and we've lived across from each other for over two years.

Mr. Big Tipper Guy has nothing to do with the topic I set out to write about so I'll get to that now: I always eat one meal a day in our facility and every chance I can I eat it at one of the common tables. The common tables are where I do most of my interacting with fellow residents. At night it's a table known as the Farm Table, at noon it's just several big tables pushed together to fit fourteen of us. I especially love the Farm Table. Someone asked us the other day what's so special about eating there and several replied that we hate the required system of having to call around to find other people to make reservations with to fill a four or six topper table in the main dining room. We can't just show up and expect to be served in the dining room. We can do that at lunch, but not for dinner. Another reason we like the Farm Table is we like not knowing who we'll dine with on any given night. We still need to make reservations to sit there but we can only make one for ourselves. For me, I like to sit close to the middle of the table and just listen to the conversations around me.  Sometimes there are three-four of them going on at once. It's an eavesdropper's paradise.  Other times we're all engaged in the same topic.

There's a lot of laughter at the Farm Table like the other night the special was an oriental dish with oyster sauce in it and several of us at the table are allergic to shell fish so we were asking Seri and Alexa what's in oyster sauce. (Yes, we are like a bunch of teenagers with our phones out fact checking each other.) I don't know what one of the guys put in the search engine of his I-Phone that it came up erroneously saying that oyster sauce was made from "nut seeds." But we all caught the silliness bug and went with that tidbit: "Who cuts the nuts off from the oysters?" "How do they extract those tiny swimmer seeds out of the nut sacks?" And "who would have ever guested that was a thing?" We were laughing so hard and one of the guys was turning beat red. Laughing over silly things doesn't happen every night but often enough that I'm addicted to eating at the Farm Table.

Living here isn't the first time I've experienced the Farm Table concept of dining. When we traveled we liked to stop at mama/papa style restaurants in small towns. One year on vacation out West we discovered that a lot of the places we stopped at had these long tables for people who wanted to interact with who ever came in for a meal or just coffee. My husband was a good conversationalist and no one was ever a stranger around him for very long. Those Farm Tables gave us a feel for the regions that you couldn't get in the chain restaurants along the main interstates. One time, though, we sat down at a Farm Table and you'd swear we accidentally went to a Klan meeting and for once my husband kept his mouth shut. His mama didn't raise any fools. 

At another Farm Table the locals told us the place was famous for their cinnamon rolls and we each had to order one with the coffee we stopped in for. They assured us they were worth every penny of the $3 they cost (in the '80s). When they arrived, each cinnamon roll covered an 8"x10" baking pan and, of course we ended up passing them around the table. Turned out to be a game they played on strangers like us to get us to treat the table. It's a fun travel memory and I often thought that cross-country Farm Table conversations would make a good book, sort of like John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. I loved that memoir of him traveling with his poodle. We always traveled with a poodle, too, in what we called our Traveling Dog House aka RV.

Our Farm Table seats twelve uncomfortably and ten perfectly. It was made out of the biggest tree that had to be cut down when the facility was built. It was a custom-made gift given to us by the construction company and it sits off to the side of our lobby which leads to another reason why it's fun to sit there. We can see and interact with everyone coming and going into the main restaurant and into the lobby---whose kids are visiting, whose getting a Door-Dash dinner delivered, whose getting a take-out dinner from the dining room, whose dog is getting walked. It took over a year to get the dining manager to allow us to have a Farm Table in the evening and she kept pulling our noon-time tables apart. She insisted it was too hard on the waitstaff. But it took going above her to finally get our way and the waitstaff is doing just fine waiting on the flow of people coming and going from the noon table. At night we have to be there at 5:00 which was our compromise.

So there you have it, another borderline boring chapter in the life of a senior citizen living in an a continuum care complex. 

Until next Wednesday. ©

 

The Farm Table set up potluck style for one of our resident-driven parties. The management occasionally serves buffet style meals on the Farm Table, too, usually around holidays when they'd normally be short-staffed.

 

This photo shows the Farm Table on the near right and at far end of the photo is our fireplace gathering place. The people standing on the left (middle of the photo) are behind the concierge's desk, directly across from the entry door.