An Extra Seat at the Table [by Jake Adam York]

A guest in another’s house, I am admiring, marveling at his taste, her taste, or I am simply curious, noticing a peculiarity of the house or the housekeeping, discovering some device I wonder how I’ve done without. I appreciate the ways my hosts have made a place for their guest—a packaged toothbrush left in the medicine cabinet, a note left next to the television—even as I enter the practice and rhythm of their lives, their house, when coffee is made and offered, when a bottle of spirit is brought, when breakfast, when dinner, and become a part of that family for a time.

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When guests are coming, we rush about the house, cleaning everything (even at times dusting off the strings inside the piano). The guest is the occasion for putting the house into its best order. Everything must be right, must show that we have anticipated the arrival, that we have made a place in our minds and in our lives, not just in our house, for our guest.

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When the guest is a surprise and the only way we have to make a place is in conversation, when we are acting out in the moment that welcoming, a new grace and assurance infuses us. We have only one chance to get it right; we have already run out of time for trial-and-error.

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So, my best days in the classroom are the days when guests visit—a student’s sister or friend, a prospective student, alumni, a colleague, a dean. Everyone, not just me, is thinking about his gestures, her words, and the conversation has a kind of pomp to it, but these are the days when I offer sharper guidance and when my students show me what they’ve learned.

Such days are so good I feel I must make a place for the guest in every class, every term and, though it’s not quite caught on among my peers, I’d love a plan of rotation in which we were always imminently visiting one another’s classes.

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Being a guest requires a similar concentration—a willingness to be at ease without being in control, but also the attention to recognize one’s opportunity to  add something to the life and work of a family or group or place. Being a guest requires practice, because it also requires a reciprocal generosity. A gift for the host or hostess may answer the call, but a guest must also be ready to offer other gifts—to raise a toast, to say the prayer, to craft and deliver the compliment at the proper moment and in a way that the host is not outshone. To be the guest is not simply to be relieved of being the host: the guest creates the host, answers to the host, completes the host. To be a guest is to enter into a real, if temporary, relationship.

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So, we learn to prepare, in some way, for the guest who may never come. My grandmother still, as her mother before, cooks enough food for twelve, though the table usually welcomes only four or six; someone, she says, might show up. We may set an extra plate, draw an extra chair, and host our invisible guest. We keep the guest bed made and change the sheets each month. We never drink all the beer. Even walking down the street, we may be ready for the moment when the passing car slows, the window rolls, so we may offer the direction.

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As an editor, a reviewer, a commenter, a scholar, a blogger, I am trying, in the best way I can, to prepare for the knock on the door, the unknown guest, whoever is lost. As an editor, I prepare the house for the guest, not knowing what the guest may need, hoping the guest’s way may be enriched by gifts not asked, not sought. As a commenter, I imagine the best I can do is to prepare a way, to make the room ready for you if you want to stay here.

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As a reader, I enter as a guest. I know the house is not my own. The silverware may not be drawn by the stove, the liquor in the sideboard. Coffee may not steam as first light parts the blinds. My tea may be sweetened with honey instead of sugar, my toast another kind of bread. And I may eat what I would have professed to dislike: even if I need not honor the food tomorrow, I will honor the plate, the hand that filled it and the hand that passed it.

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Much as I prefer the dim and somewhat dusty aficionado bookstores you thread like gardens or mazes, lost for hours, with names that are clever but rarely repeated, the mall bookstore—like Borders, which is now liquidating—has always kept a very vital place in my crossings.

I grew up on the extremely rural end of a county in northeast Alabama, and our town’s one bookstore, when I was growing up, was a chainlink in the indoor mall. That’s where, as I wrote earlier this week, was where I believe I bought my first Best American Poetry. Since most of my family’s still situated in and around Alabama, I find myself traveling through some relatively rural landscapes several times a year—maybe to a wedding, a vacation, or on some other errand—and in those travels, through towns that don’t have and haven’t had a bibliophiliac’s bookstore for decades (if they ever had one at all), the promise of a Borders or a Barnes and Noble was a comfort. Even though these stores tucked their poetry sections in the back dark corners, and even though you’ll see displayed there the latest volume of poetry by some popular musician or former president more prominently than work by the long-dedicated contemporary masters of the language and the forms, you can usually count on the ability to find a good anthology, if you find yourself on a sudden beach excursion or waiting for a radiator replacement more than a hundred miles from another bookstore.

These places, as like one another as hotels are like other hotels, have made a place for me, have accommodated me when I have been a guest in a town or a county I could not well navigate, and for their hospitation, I am ever thankful.

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This is my last post, and as I sign off, I’m thankful to Stacey Harwood and Jill Alexander Essbaum for making a place for me here, to David Lehman for making a place for us all, and for any of you who’ve read any of these posts, for letting me be a guest in your reading room, and for, in some way, letting me turn to serve, to host for a moment—and so, too, thank you for being a guest as well, and calling me to better language.

 

Comments

[scott]

real quick: this was great. good week. thanks.

[The Best American Poetry]

I agree, Scott, this was a great week.. I hope you will consider a return visit Jake. Thanks also to Laura Orem for making this connection possible.

[Lisa]

A lovely meditation on being a guest...thanks Jake. I enjoyed your posts a great deal. Lisa