Hospitality

I had some girls from my work over for dinner last night, which was a pretty big deal for me on several levels: Monday night after a long and hectic weekend wherein no laundry was done whatsoever; not sure what to cook; people that I’m still getting to know and whom I will have to share corridors and the tea room with even if they hate my food and can’t find my treehouse; the conspicuous and disturbing fact that we don’t have a dining room table in this house and so we eat on the couch with bowls in our laps every night of our lives like the barbarians we are.

There’s also the little thing of how I am actually way, way more comfortable in other peoples’ houses than I am having them in mine. If you invite me to your house, I will take off my shoes and grab you the butter out of the fridge and check out your bookshelves and cuddle with your cat and maybe do up any stray dishes you have laying around. I won’t ask if you need any help in the kitchen, I’ll just turn the heat down under the onions and sprawl comfortably on the couch. I am sorry to report that I have been known to go into close friends’ rooms and make their beds, because clearly I have no social skills or boundaries at all.

Unless or until, of course, you come to my house, and then I will get very nervous and worried that you are judging me and my living situation and I will have to try very, very hard not to shriek MY STUFF IS JUST HOW I LIKE IT PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB IT IN ANY WAY. If you ask me where to find the cheese grater I’ll howl OH DON’T WORRY I’LL DO IT HA HA HA NO REALLY I’LL DO IT. Your house? Here, I made you a strawberry smoothie. My house? Just have a seat while I sob with anxiety as I’m putting together the cheese plate, okay?

I have no idea why this should be, because I’ve basically always been this way; in high school I slept at my friend Amy’s house pretty much every weekend for two years but I think I can count on my hands how many times she came over to mine. And it’s not like I have precious heirlooms or even more than one good knife, nor do I have friends who routinely smash up the crockery or spill things on the carpet. There’s no good reason for me to be bad at hospitality—I mean, for one thing, I’ve been sharing housing with lovely randoms I’ve found on the internet since 2004, for those of you with long memories, so clearly I can handle having some people in my space—and I don’t claim to understand how someone who loves people and loves food and even sort of loves houses would quake and quail at the idea of having people in her house to eat food, but there it is. I was terrified last night.

But it all went very nicely, I’m happy to report: I made a weeknight pasta dish (pumpkin ravioli from Moore Wilson with spinach, caramelized onions, a little blue cheese and a little sundried tomato pesto) and the girls brought bread and more veggies and wine and juice and homemade cookies and we built up the fire to a level that was uncomfortably roasty for everyone else but that was almost, almost warm enough for me and sat around on the couches and on the floor and ate and drank and talked a little public health shop (we’ve mostly recovered from swine flu although we still get a little twitchy and green around the gills if someone mentions disease vectors or community transmission and we’re all still washing our hands a lot, like a lot) and then moved on to expatriation stories because three of us were Americans and wound up, as you do, discussing sex and body image issues. Everyone liked the pasta and stayed way later than they meant, and today at work we sent some congratulatory emails around about how cool we all were. There are plans in the works to eat dinner together on a Monday night sometime in the future, possibly even again in my house!

And I am totally rolling my eyes at myself as I write this because, hi, I’m almost thirty-five years old and I am so impressed with myself for doing something so very basically social, as if I’m five years old and basking in the wake of a successful tea party for all my dolls and teddy bears. But also I’m thinking about the value of hospitality in general, and about how much I admire people who can do it well—about how gracious people have been to me over the years, not just in the big ways, like all the ABL parties over the years or when Deirdre picked me up at the Wellington train station and took me to her house and fed me fush-n-chups, or when Melanie totally saved me from a very rough Australian situation, but also all the small ways: the dinners at Giulia’s, the cups and cups and cups of tea at Alice’s, the RockBand nights at Sharon’s and hot tub parties at Renee’s, the Key Girl Christmases at Manya’s and Marah’s and Ashley’s. All those nights I spent at Amy’s house, down the street from me on the island, her dad yelling out “Daughter Number Two!” whenever I walked in. All the good food, all the couches and pillows and blankets and beds, all the sitting around talking and laughing around all the kitchen tables.

It’s a small thing, it’s a big thing. It’s a gift. It’s something I’d like to cultivate so that I can give it back one day.