The VERB - February '07

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PEACE, LOVE AND A BIG YELLOW TABLE
by Robin Allen

“On the next trip, my sister would see that the flamingo pink sombrero,
which looked festive and adorable on her in the mirrors in Mexico,
looked silly in the mirrors at home."

When I was little, my family had a ridiculous breakfast table. It was as round, bright, and yellow as the sun. And big. One of us could spill a glass of milk at breakfast and the splash wouldn’t reach the others until dinner.

My parents bought the big yellow table in Mexico during a trip across the border to shop for silver bracelets, tooled leather purses, and marble chess boards. Later, during our musical phase, these trips would yield castanets, maracas, and bongo drums. The bright colors and sultry heat of Mexico has a way of enchanting you into believing you can’t live without something, so I can only assume that my dad was under a spell when he decided that a) we needed a new breakfast table, and b) it needed to be a big yellow one.

We had made dozens of these border runs, enough to know that by the time we returned home and hauled our Mexican curios into our Texas rooms, the spell would be broken, our shiny treasures transformed into mere gimcracks. My brother would realize that the life-sized statue of a knight’s armor he refused to leave the country without didn’t look as cool next to his twin bed as it did against a backdrop of hundreds of piñatas. On the next trip, my sister would see that the flamingo pink sombrero, which looked festive and adorable on her in the mirrors in Mexico, looked silly in the mirrors at home. The knight ended up serving as sentry in the garage, no doubt embarrassed by his sequined sombrero and whipstitched gun holster.

When we finally got the big yellow table into the house and alongside the rest of our French Provincial furniture, it looked like a sumo wrestler at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. I thought my dad would own up to his big yellow mistake and the knight would finally have a place to sit down and play the bongos. Instead, my dad gave an approving nod, then started dragging in the big yellow chairs.