The painting Hambre (Hunger in Spanish) by Lucía Vidales recently on display at the Kemper Contemporary Museum brought many memories to mind.

The painting depicts a dinner with guests arranged about a table abundant in food, surreal references and juxtapositions. It fuels a certain nostalgia, the idea of the large weekend dinners that were the staple of my grandmother’s house. Memory plays with me. I can’t tell you that they took place every weekend, but they should have, and they might have. 

I miss them though they were so far in the past I should not have memory of them. The truth is I can’t help but feel there was something complete when all the family gathered round the dinner table. The smell of food cooking would permeate the house from early morning. Us kids knew we were to be tolerated but not entertained. Better to be out of sight then to be in the way of the adults as they prepared the large weekend meal.

All the adults sat at the large table, we sat in the smaller tables at the edge of the large dining room. We would wait until my grandmother’s benediction and then began the clatter of dishes and words flowing across the mounds of food and drinks that littered the table. And the conversations that flowed at the adult table made me wish I had been older and paid attention to what was being said. But we were kids. I don’t recall any "fuzzing" about, minding this or that; the only admonition was if we left the table without permission. 

Years later I feel the loss of the communal meal. There have been substitutes, the office potluck, the ritual of the pregame cook outs.  I can’t help but feel a loss that nothing has supplanted.

Hambre is the lusting for a time when to gather round a meal was an expectation, a celebration, and not an imposed ritual to preserve a unity slowly disappearing with each passing generation.