The longest table

On a Saturday night, scrubbed clean, with N and V next to me, we sit at the longest table. There are plates and plates of food. There are kind and familiar faces. This being Georgia - of course there is wine, a handful of the makers sitting across from us, or arriving late with bright red cheeks out of breath as a chair is dragged out for them. There are toasts - long, rambling poems that circle and underline some odd fragment of life, ending with the soft touching of glasses. And yes, some of the foreigners at the table talk over all of this, steamrolling the local traditions and I am embarrassed to be one of them.

My favorite toast is to sweet memories.

I stand, and talk about one of my earliest recollections - when we were still in Brooklyn, and how the tablecloths in restaurants all seemed to have red and white checks back then, and how I tried so hard to stay awake, but ended up tucking my head on my hands, falling asleep right at the table - and here is V, wide awake, nibbling on olives and pickled flowers called jonjoli into the wee hours making her own memories.

A guitar is pulled from a corner. Songs tumble out, older than old, faces stern, eyes lost in some invisible horizon. I stare into my little glass, and the whole world is inside it for a few minutes.

The singers are the owners of this place - tired from the kitchen, but buoyed by the request for one more song, joined by one of my favorite winemakers.

There is nothing like sitting at these tables, for feasts large and small, not pinned to a birthday or a holiday, simply a night to sit down and drink deep, not just the wine, but suck down the odd sparks of life, the laugh of a friend after a salty story, of young lovers, of old couples, a childhood in bloom, a spontaneous gift, a bumpy ride home after it all, the taxi driver pulled from a lost Fellini film.