The Tale of the Tablecloth

When I was girl, maybe 10 or 12, my Bubbie announced that it was time for her to begin embroidering my tablecloth.


By that point, she already had made table coverings for my two sisters and two other older female cousins. After me, there was one more female cousin, Colleen, who, at the time, was barely in elementary school.

(The exquisite green and purple tablecloth she made for my sister Susan made an exquisite Chuppah [marriage canopy] cover when my niece Shayle married her Todd last summer.)

Sitting in her bedroom, Bubbie showed me the linen cloth, stiff with starch and dotted with the design. She also laid out an array of threads in a rainbow of colors and asked me to choose which I wanted.

Being, even then, a fan of the classic and the tailored, I chose a silvery taupe.

Bubbie looked puzzled and asked if I was sure that was the color I wanted. I nodded my head yes. She shrugged her shoulders and said okay.

I always had been a bit of a mystery to my grandmother. As a child, I was as withdrawn and bookish as she was dramatic and flamboyant. There is no question that she used her bigger-than-life personality for good; she had an immigrant good citizenship award from the Daughters of the American Revolution to prove it. Bubbie just found it easier to relate to her grandchildren with personalities more similar to her own.

To her credit, she had given me a choice and I had chosen a brownish-gray color. So, that’s what it would be.

The tablecloth turned out to be beautiful. The thread shimmers next to white china and gleaming silver. It also has served me well my entire life, looking as appropriate for a 56-year-old as it did for a 26-year-old. It clearly is one of the best gifts I ever received.

So, why am I telling this story the day before Rosh Hashana, when the Jewish New Year begins. One obvious answer is that Bubbie’s gift already is draped across my dining room table, ready for my guests the first night of the holiday.

There’s a lot more to the story, however.

That very tablecloth, created to be part of my trousseau when I married, played an important role in my engagement and subsequent marriage to Marc. It clinched the deal, so to speak, when we imagined ourselves to be beshert .

Beshert is one of the most overused and misunderstood terms in Jewish life. It refers back to a Talmudic passage that 40 days prior to the formation of the fetus, a Heavenly voice comes down from Above and decrees who is to be mated with whom..

Spending all of one’s life searching for your beshert would probably assure you a long spinsterhood or bachelorhood. Many couples marry because they see potential in each other and, with lots of love and hard work, have a very successful partnership. It may not have been love at first site for most people, but it created a tremendously satisfying relationship anyway.

After my first marriage ended, I certainly was not looking for my beshert. I wasn’t even sure I ever wanted to marry again.

Then, one Saturday in synagogue, I saw this man carrying the Torah. He had a kind face and was wearing a gray Brooks Brothers suit. It was the Shabbos between Yom Kippur and Sukkos, and I actually had prayed for guidance in my love life.

The man looked and me and I looked at him. It was as if we had known each other forever.

I wondered if that was the man the rabbi had told me about. As we had walked to his house on Yom Kippur, the rabbi had told me that he had met a man named Marc who seemed to be the male version of me. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that but I was intrigued.

Due to a confusing set of circumstances, Marc and I did not meet that first Sabbath we saw each other. We actually were introduced a few days later, the first day of Succos, inside of a booth that symbolizes the holiday. I didn’t like him at all.

He came across as a know-it-all, and he made it very clear that he had no interest in being traditionally religious. (I found that puzzling because, usually, the only Jews who show up for services on Succos, are either religious or interested in becoming so.)

That day, I went to some friends’ house for a holiday lunch. The other diners were two men with their children; in both cases, their wives had to work that day. They asked about my dating prospects but I didn’t tell them about the guy I had met. I truly thought nothing would come of it.

The next day, I spotted Marc across the sanctuary. He was sitting next to a woman and chatting with her. Inexplicably, I was jealous.

At the light meal after the service, he made his way across the crowd to talk to me. He mentioned that he had met a woman in services; she was in town with her husband for her conference and wanted to go to synagogue for the holiday.

I’m not sure why, but I was relieved.

Marc showed up for the entire string of holidays and by the time Simchas Torah had passed, we had made a date for a movie.

The movie was a Coen brothers flick called Barton Fink. It was kind of dark and disturbing. We both liked it a lot.

As we talked, we found a surprising number of commonalities. My close friend in college at Emory had been his close friend when he went to the Georgia Governor’s Honors program as a high-schooler. His former business partner was the father of my work colleague and friend. We had often attended the same movies at the same theaters on the same Sunday afternoons and had both shown up regularly for the delivery of the Sunday New York Times at a local bookshop.

And it went on and on.. What was nice, of course, is that we knew so many people in common that I didn’t worry that I would later find out he was a psychopathic ax murderer.

When we went back to my house and looked through my record albums (yes, it was a very different time and place), he was amazed that I had such a large collection of both Ella Fitzgerald and Stephen Sondheim, his favorites. Indeed, I may have been the first person he’d ever met who really loved Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures.

We began dating and, on the third date barely a week later, talked about getting married. There just seemed to be too many coincidences. Maybe, just maybe, we were meant to be.

One Friday night, we invited guests to my house to join us for a Sabbath meal. Marc was helping me cook and prepare.

I opened the drawer and pulled out Bubbie’s tablecloth. I told him how I had picked the color as a child.

He started laughing, and I thought he was amused because I had been so precocious in my taste.

That wasn’t it. A few days later, he came to my house carrying a dry cleaner bag. In it were freshly cleaned and starched linen napkins. They had been painstakingly embroidered by his mother. The pattern was very similar to my tablecloth and the thread….well, the thread was a silvery taupe.

My future mother-in-law, Erika, of blessed memory, had made them when Marc was a child.

Marc and I married in a traditionally Jewish ceremony a few months later, just after the holiday of Passover.

We’ll be using the tablecloth and the “matching” napkins the first night of Rosh Hashana this year. It will be the 18th holiday Marc and I have spent together.

I guess no one ever really knows if they are married to their beshert, but the tablecloth and napkins tomorrow night make a fairly good argument for us. Shana Tova to all.