‘The table is our first geometry: square, circle, rectangle, or the pecan oval of my childhood where I am a fixed point beside my sister, across from my brother, with our parents at the head and foot. I did not always sit there. In a photo taken on my second birthday, I am sitting in a highchair, beating my hands on the metal tray smeared with cake, wearing a chocolate frosting grin. I am tangential to the family table and the picture shows me straining to get out of my highchair to attain a place at the bigger, better table. In a later photo I am consoled with the dregs of someone’s wine glass. At two, I already understand something: the party is at the other table, the table I am not seated at, the table a short distance from my highchair or across the room in the restaurant or across the room of memory….’
Read more from ‘Family Geometry‘, first published in Fourth Genre 5(1), Spring 2003, and selected for republication by the editors for Five Years of Fourth Genre, Michigan State University Press (IBSN 087013776X), USA, 2006.
For more of Diane’s work, see Publications.