The Cluttered Kitchen Table

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• November 16, 2025

My grandparents on the Palminteri side lived in the same town as us in the very same house my Dad grew up in with his five siblings. It was a modest, if not small, ranch. Our house wasn’t a big house by anyone’s measure, but it was certainly bigger than the OG Palminteri house, where, three girls were stacked in one bedroom while three boys in another (until my Dad and my Uncle converted the garage into another bedroom) and all shared one bathroom for many years until, (once again) my Dad and Uncle decided to put in a second bathroom. The mere thought of only one bathroom in a house with that many kids horrified me. My favorite part of living alone is having a bathroom to myself.

We usually visited Grandpa and Grandma every Sunday after church. It was rare we went a week without seeing them. Visiting our grandparents was neither exciting nor dreadful. It was always more fun if some of our cousins would also be there, which also wasn’t unusual. And it was also better than going to church. If your parents are raising you right, then you will know that the world doesn’t revolve around you, and that sometimes you do things for other people. Even though we loved our grandparents, they were boring to us, but we understood it made their day when we visited.

Though my Grandma was one of the kindest, pure-hearted people to ever live, surprisingly for a 100% Italian woman, she wasn’t really a great cook. In fact, my Mom, who isn’t Italian at all, was/is a far better Italian cook than Grandma Palminteri ever was. Cooking, like most things, made my Grandma nervous. She was a worried woman, which later in life took the ultimate toll on her as it exasperated her Alzheimer’s disease— tragically, one of the worst things any human can go through.

We usually brought food to my grandparents. Boston Market was popular with Grandparent visits, unless we came before noon and then we brought bagels. The kitchen had a corner booth and we’d pull in chairs from the dining room. The Palminteri’s are a petite people, so it was pretty easy for us to shove in a booth after we removed piles of newspapers from the seats. Personally, I liked to go through the newspapers but I rarely read anything but funnies and maybe the entertainment section if there was an article about a movie I was excited about.

For the most part, these were pleasant visits that sit in my memory like a Norman Rockwell painting. But like every family, we weren’t perfect. Grandpa was overly religious, and often lectured us. You wanted to keep clear of certain topics, especially politics which inevitably led to Grandpa yelling about abortion. And I mean, yelling.

Grandma had very little to say. She was soft spoken and not exactly a conversationalist. I’d tell her about school or share a funny story and she’s listen and smile but she rarely shared any tales of her past out of humility and also I’m unsure how often I asked, regrettably.

When we showed up with brunch, lunch or dinner, Mom would spend several minutes clearing the cluttered kitchen table. Grandpa spied my Mom as she did so. He liked certain things to stay. But it needed clearing. There wasn’t enough room on the table to place the food, let alone hand out plates and utensils to everyone. The table was filled with opened and unopened cookie and cracker boxes, greeting cards, little gifts from various people like religious statues or small stuffed animals, mugs or water glasses (some used, some clean), medications, magazines, and most of all, an array of vitamins so vast, you almost felt like you were in a GNC.

An Uncle and Aunt, at the time, were really into a semi-cultish vitamin pyramid scheme. While I’m sure some of the vitamins were useful, the majority of them were scams. This is because the majority of most vitamins are scams. And I’m not saying you “shouldn’t take vitamins,” but if you don’t think the vitamin industry is 80% a scam, then I’m not going to change your mind but I highly suggest you spend more time talking to pharmacists.

The state of the kitchen table drove both of my parents crazy. You see, our kitchen table was relatively pristine. When the kitchen table wasn’t occupied with a meal, the only things that belonged on the kitchen table were placemats (which changed with the seasons and holidays because my mom loves cute decorative ones even though dad saw it as a waste of money, as he saw most things as a waste of money) and a napkin holder. Of course, the kitchen table is also where us kids did homework or where we played family board games (we have always been a big game family). This was even more reason to clear the table in between, however. The kitchen table was meant to be wiped down between activities and dinner. A kitchen table should be cleaned and sanitized frequently. As we got older, we’d get yelled at if we left our homework out and didn’t put it away in our backpack where it belonged. Or if we left crumbs from snacking, which we frequently did, especially my kid brother, who, to this day at 34 years old, seems blind to breadcrumb trails.

But back to the vitamin filled table at my Grandparents. Certain vitamins, especially gummy multivitamins were shared with the kids. We liked gummy vitamins because what kid doesn’t? Gummy vitamins are STILL my favorite kind of vitamins. It wasn’t until we were a little older when my Dad told us not to accept vitamins from my Grandpa. Not because he didn’t trust the vitamins. More because my Grandpa would eat with his hands, often licking his fingers to clean them, and then stick his hand inside the vitamin tube. With no disrespect to my late Grandpa, but the vast majority of elderly people do start to eat in a gross way, blind to (and my Grandpa did become literally legally blind) unsanitary ways. As someone who worked in the dietary department in a nursing home for years, I can attest that this is true for about 95% of elderly people.

As I write this at my little kitchen two top table in my studio apartment, I can’t help but think about all of this. Because my kitchen table is cluttered. There are books, a pen holder, a cute Baby Yoda salt/pepper shaker (from Mom, of course), notepads, a weed grinder, coasters from Paris, mail, a napkin holder which doesn’t hold any napkins but instead set lists, notes, cards, rolling papers, photographs, and other keepsakes, and of course… vitamins.

While my apartment is clean in some ways as I am obsessed with sanitation, there are corners of my apartment that are severely cluttered, along with stacks and stacks of books everywhere. Part of this has to do with the fact that I’ve been living in a studio apartment for a decade and there is little to no storage. Additionally, I don’t have much company over because, again, it’s a studio apartment— I don’t even have a couch. Since there’s little hosting, there seems to be less of a need to clear the table and make it a sacred place of eating.

My apartment seems to be a direct reflection of my mind, which is cluttered with ideas, dreams, worries, memories, wisdom from great writers and thinkers, anxieties, hope and dread (one cannot have true hope without dread). Like a bohemian artist and every broke writer before and after me, I live in a nest of the comfort and chaos of what’s inside my head, which is manifesting itself outside my head.

One of the things about living in an apartment with a family above me, is sometimes in those hours in the morning where I’m still mostly sleeping, I hear them coming down the stairs, talking to each other. They aren’t boisterous or anything like that. In fact, I find the activity rather comforting. In my sleepy haze, I’m sometimes confused. I truly believe I’m in my childhood home and it’s my Mom or Dad going to make breakfast, or my sister or brother getting ready for the day. There’s a total lapse in my brain that it’s been over a decade since I’ve been on my own. My adolescence further and further away from me, everyday.

Then, when the memory fog fades, I realize I am home… just not in that home. An overwhelming sense of sadness feels me up to make my body so heavy, I feel like a magnet to my bed. Loneliness I feel too, a great yearning to have breakfast with someone I love. It’s a brief moment where I feel that I will never leave my bed again. And an urgency to call my Mom right away, maybe in tears. The heartbreaking thought that one day, I won’t be able to talk to her ever again nearly breaks me.

Yet. Every time, these melancholy morning moments melts away from me in a few minutes after some mild meditation. What an absolute privilege, if not joy it is, to love and be loved so much. That aching heart feeling turns into something rather beautiful, if not pure. Whatever was just crippling me, suddenly motivates me. And I look out the window of my cluttered little apartment, ready for a brand new day.