Essays From West of 98: Returning to The Table

The memory of an important cultural institution

I must hold in the hopper a bit longer my pending essay about the symbolism of Jesus as the gardener on Easter Sunday. Pending a little more revision, it will soon be ready for publication. I wrote the following essay in late 2023. At the time, it was the most read essay of my writing career. My page views have since escalated, thanks to some Wendell Berry essays and my letter to the current Secretary of Agriculture.

This essay has recently taken on new meaning, however. The long-closed Cliff House was demolished earlier this spring. The property was sold and a new O’Reilly Auto Parts will soon come to Stamford on that site, across from Tractor Supply and just down the road from the Walmart Supercenter. There are mixed feelings about this within our community. New investment in our town represents one thing, but the demolition of a legendary local establishment represents something else. I am a firm believer that a thoughtful human can simultaneously hold multiple conflicting feelings and opinions on a topic and on this one, I do just that. Now, on to the story of The Table:

You know the table. If you have ever visited a small town café or neighborhood diner at breakfast time, you have seen it. It is a crowd of “regulars.” Usually older and mostly male, the crowd has a peculiar cast of characters that fits the locale. The restaurant staff knows them well. If you wander within earshot, you might hear them haranguing one another in a manner that would never fit a more genteel gathering. The group seems to be part of the restaurant’s fixtures. If the place sold, they would go with it, alongside the worn-out chairs and the ancient ceramic coffee mugs.

Stamford had such a table for most of the last twenty-five years. It reached its zenith at the Cliff House (RIP) in the early to mid-2000s, with at least a dozen regular or semi-regular characters. After that fine establishment closed, it took on new forms at other locales, finally at R&R Restaurant. The cast could have been conceived in some great novel about small town life: a bread man, a schoolteacher, a bus driver, a cattle trader, a railroad engineer, a fire chief, and more. Most of the cast members were retired or semi-retired. I happened to know the group better than most, because my grandfather was cast as the character of the Bread Man. He lived in Haskell, but he started driving 15 miles to Stamford each morning for coffee after a disagreement with the management at the Haskell café over the proper method of cooking breakfast potatoes. Yes, really.

My grandfather passed in 2020 and he was one of the last remaining members of the group. The last of the regulars, the Bus Driver, passed away in late 2023. At the Bus Driver’s funeral, I thought about the end of the era and the memories that came with it. After I moved back to Stamford in 2009, I spent more than a few Saturday mornings soaking in the wisdom at The Table. The Cliff House opened at 6 AM. I had the temerity to arrive somewhere around 6 AM, much to the chagrin of the Bread Man and his compatriots. The Bread Man usually arrived closer to 5 AM. After a lifetime of awakening at 3 AM, he saw it as the natural option. Plus, what if the café miraculously opened early? (It rarely did.) If the Bus Driver did not arrive obnoxiously early, the Bread Man would call him repeatedly before 5:30 AM, accusing him of sleeping until midday.

There are many stories. Most are embargoed under the policy that What Happens at the Cliff House Stays at the Cliff House. However, I do recall one famous (or infamous) incident. The Table had a tradition of everyone giving a dollar to any attendee celebrating a birthday. I paid in pennies on at least one occasion, because the method of payment was not specified and obnoxiousness was a competitive sport in the group. Several years before I moved home, a casual acquaintance of The Table was celebrating a birthday the next week but he would be away on his birthday. They all gave him a dollar, but then he surprisingly passed away before his actual birthday. The conversation that ensued was a real-life version of Tom T. Hall’s “Ballad of Forty Dollars.” A rule was instituted that a man could only receive his birthday dollar if he achieved the actual birthday itself. Today, I insist on birthday celebrations taking place on or after the person’s birthday (often to the chagrin of my family), but I feel I owe it to the denizens of The Table to continue their fidelity to timely birthday achievement.

There’s a reason I’m writing about this topic, beyond the opportunity to tell a few enjoyable tales. I am a fan of Nathaniel Marshall’s Substack, “The Blue Scholar.” In between my hatching my idea for this newsletter and putting pen to yellow pad, he wrote an essay titled “In Defense of Yard Talk.” This essay examines the importance of craftsmen discussing their work and joshing one another as the workday kicks off or winds down. It is a thoughtful look at the meaningful nature of seemingly meaningless small talk. I think similarly about those conversations at The Table. No one labeled it a salon of philosophical thought, but sometimes it was! As these men got older, their responsibilities dwindled in work and community, so it was a valuable source of fellowship and conversation. The verbal jousting sometimes made you wonder if they even liked each other, but that was an important opportunity to sharpen their wits. Their stories of days gone by—people they knew, lives they lived, adventures they had—were an act of perpetuating local culture, even if they never called it such. For many years, I was the only attendee under 40. Perhaps local culture was not spread as far as it deserved to be, but I carry with me their memories and stories and I like to think I have put them to good use.

In his essay “The Work of Local Culture,” Wendell Berry advocates for institutions of local culture, but he does not advocate for formal institutions sharing a centrally-approved local origin story. Quite the opposite. He expresses the importance of informal gatherings of local people, sharing stories and passing on the culture of a place through the generations. In Berry’s Port William fiction, there is a central repository of local culture where people meet to share, cuss, and discuss. It is not a school, library, or other formal facility. It is Jayber Crow’s barber shop.

As I reminisce on The Table, I know that this place and this cast will never be replicated. That’s okay. It was the proper cultural institution for its moment in time. That time has passed, but the memories of the Bread Man, the Bus Driver, and all the rest live on. If we value our local culture as we should, we will seek out and create new places and new casts of characters to create our own version of The Table.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the “Rural Church and State” and “West of 98” podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.