Kitchen Table Song
It must be jelly 'cause jam don't shake like that.
—Sunny Skylar
When I was little, I spent a lot of afternoons sitting at the kitchen table. After school was out, and my homework done, I had all afternoon—long, luxurious hours leading up to dinner—to sit with my mother, my brother and my grandmother, passing the time.
Often, we'd play cards. I was quite the Uno shark then. Later, we upgraded to poker, playing for pennies. We started with seven-card stud and blackjack, but when those got boring, we turned to a slim volume that listed every card game imaginable, with an endless inventory of rules and exceptions and wildcards combined inexplicably into games with distinctive titles: baseball, football, Texas this and New York that.
When it wasn't cards, it was drawing with multicolored pens and pencils, paper scattered everywhere, masterpieces torn out of giant pads and passed around the table to the grown-ups to be oohed and ahhed over before being put on display, held in place by a magnet on the refrigerator. Or it was jigsaw puzzles, big pieces, small pieces, scattered on one table or, as we got older and the pieces got smaller and more abundant, spread over both the tables in the room, one for grown-ups, the other for kids.
The kitchen table played a crucial role in my childhood, before I turned 11 and 12 and became too busy to sit still. For during those early years, amid all shuffling of papers and cards and tiny, illustrated chunks of cardboard, one of the great constants was my grandma and her stories.
Many times—between card games when someone was shuffling, or to fill silences when we were stumped trying to find an elusive puzzle piece, or during a break in the activity to eat milk and cookies or a bowl of grapes—someone would say or do something to remind my grandma of what she had done when she was little. What life was like for her growing up in the '20s and '30s, and into the '40s, when she was a young woman, first on her own.
Sometimes, she conjured these reminiscences herself. She'd get excited about winning a hand at cards and, not unlike I do now when I'm delighted by something, she'd bounce around in her chair a bit and start humming a sprightly tune.
Doo do do doodoo
Do doo doo doo doo doo…
She'd smile, a twinkle in her eye, and we'd erupt into giggles.
"What's that song, grandma?"
"Why, it's a song from when I was a young woman," she'd explain. And then she'd add lyrics to the melody.
It must be jelly
'Cause jam don't shake like that…
"Those are silly words, grandma," we'd say.
"Oh, I guess they are kind of silly, aren't they. But believe it or not, that was a very popular song back then."
She had so many songs, and so many memories to go with them. She'd launch into a story about her stern father, and how because she was the baby, and he doted on her, she was the only one who could get away with anything. Or she'd talk about her older siblings, and how they used to play—and fight. And my brother and I would sit there and try to imagine these people—whom we'd only ever known as old, wrinkled adults sitting in their living room easy chairs talking about really boring stuff—being young, like us. Spry and mischievous. And prone to getting each other into trouble.
My grandma talked about how she joined the W.A.V.E.S. during World War II, and how she went to work every day wearing a smart, pressed uniform with a button-up top and a skirt. In my mind my grandmother was this beautiful young woman who would walk down the sidewalk with her girlfriends, clutching her purse, with all the men along the way calling to them and whistling from park benches or from behind barbershop windows.
So many of these stories were peppered with music—the Charleston, old-school swing, the electrifying sound blasted by big bands at USO dances.
"You used to dance?" I'd say, amazed.
"Oh, yes! I loved to dance! Everyone did. We couldn't get enough of it."
"Then why don't you dance anymore, Grandma?"
"Well, times change, honey. People grow up and get busy, and then there's no time for dancing."
Grandma did get busy. She went to school. She got married. She had one daughter, then another. And when the second one—my mother—was just over one year old, her husband walked out and never came back.
My grandma became a single mother in the 1950s. And aside from the times years later, when her daughters were grown and got married and she got to dance with her new son-in-laws, I don't know that she ever danced—really danced—again.
It should have been no surprise to me that when I took up swing dancing six yeas ago, my grandma thought it was absolutely marvelous. Here I was, fifty years after her care-free heyday, swiveling and swirling to Count Basie and Duke Ellington and the Andrews Sisters, drinking rum and Coca Cola and saluting the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.
It was thrilling to me, too. In the middle of a dance at Broadway Studios in San Francisco, I'd be dancing with a boy and suddenly find myself singing the words to songs I didn't even realize I knew—the very songs my grandma used to sing as we sat around that kitchen table, whiling away the afternoons. But now, the songs had rousing horns behind them, trumpets and trombones and piccolos, drums and cymbals, and I could see the bandleader in his white suit, tapping and waving his baton and bouncing in place, and I could feel the spirit of the era, of pride, and progress, and optimism.
It must be jelly
'Cause jam don't shake like that…
My partner would look at me quizzically. "You seem to like this song. You must have danced to it before, eh?"
"No, I haven't," I swore. "I just kind of know the song."
And I'd smile, and swing, and look around this big ballroom, with the girls dressed in their vintage dresses and the men in their retro jackets, twenty-somethings at the turn of the 21st century flipping their Zippo lighters and sipping classic cocktails, and I'd close my eyes and let the music enter me and imagine how it must have felt to be my grandma, in the 1940s, taking a turn around the dance floor with a tall, strong boy—so many doomed young men whom she'd walk away from at the end of the dance and know she would probably never see again. She might be the last woman that boy touched before going off to war. Heady times. Sad times. So many of those boys never came back.
This week, my grandmother turned 80 years old. She can no longer dance. She can barely toddle, standing upright only with the help of a four-legged walker. With arthritic hands and a nerve disease slowly consuming the feeling in her feet and legs, her arms and fingers, she can't even hold a full hand of cards to play poker, nor would she be able to manipulate the tiny pieces if the kids were still home working jigsaw puzzles. Yet she has her stories, and every time I go home—whether on my own or with friends in tow—I look forward to hearing her tell them again, be they tales I know well from childhood or new pieces of her history I could never have fathomed.
I live far away now, on the other side of a continent that looks nothing like it did when my grandma got butterflies in her stomach at the USO balls. But when I am on the dance floor, whirling to Basie, swaying to the Duke, dressed in jeans and sneakers and sweating up a storm, without fail I think of my grandmother. I think of us sitting around that kitchen table, laughing and humming, first making fun of her silly songs, then singing along because her enthusiasm was contagious. I imagine her my age, or probably a bit younger, fresh and innocent, all dressed up, standing at the edge of the dance floor and tapping her foot to the music. Because she is young. Because she can't help it. Because she's full of hope and excitement. Because at any moment, some handsome young man in uniform might seek her out and ask her to dance. Because she still has her whole life ahead of her. Because it must be jelly—'cause jam don't shake like that.
