In my world, there is nothing of more importance than a good dinner party. It is always filled with joy, life and smells and tastes to spice up the world and make it right/write. Our dining table will accommodate three or six or ten or twenty-four, when finally maxed out. It is always decorated for the occasion and festooned with candles burning to add ambience and glow. Evenings are spent laughing or talking, eating and drinking until all are well sated. It hosted all our daughter’s friends for a long night of wine and passionate discussion and laughter about the future. It held small tables of family reminiscing over those we have lost or how sometimes we have lost ourselves or one another; and we added tears to such recollections. It held those who worked for me and those who worked with me and the business of caretaking infused the dialog. It held our friends of decades when conversation is filled with familiarity and a robustness found no other time. It held writers and readers sitting in anticipation of all that might come.
My return from pandemic hell would be a night around the table. First, the food – Italian with large amounts of sausages and meatballs, grilled vegetables, a deep and rich red sauce hot from roiling on the stove filled with peeled tomatoes, red pepper flakes, and a large mess of garlic and basil. Two large containers of pasta – penne or wide noodles to soak up and hold the sauce and stand up to all the other food. A blue cheese and sliced tomato salad oiled with the finest of virgin olive oil and garlic. Yes, much garlic to ward of the vampires. Maybe burrata for those who can’t tolerate the richness and tang of the blue. Small cups of roasted corn soup creamed with truffle oil drizzled on top. Chianti, a plenty, although we might start the evening with sparkling rose to give the beginning a snap. Bread, long loaves of the Italian or French variety, easily torn for soaking up sauce and sponging up the grease from the sausages and meatballs – meat from a real meat market. The evening closes with tiramisu, Sauterne and espresso, or maybe Crème Brulee dripped with caramel sauce and an aged Port.
You, whoever you might be, sit about the table ready to cross conversational swords or talk of the great books read in quarantine. To regale everyone with a painting or perfect photo taken on a solitary walk. You might read us a poem or some prose recently written in the cloister or provide a tale from the Bard or your favorite moment from the Illiad, which you finally got around to reading, or regale us about the latest show binged when the world was closed and you could find nothing else to do.
When the moment comes, I will open the world with a meal and a corkscrew and each of you and you and you and me will be welcome.