An Affair I Remember

by Val White (Excerpt from ‘Table Stories’)

One of my earliest vivid memories—if not the first—is from July 29, 1981. I had just turned four years old, and it was my mother’s birthday.

The sun streamed through the front windows and the glass pane of the door, illuminating little particles of dust that sparkled like fairy dust as they danced through the air before gently settling back into the plush, split pea–colored carpet of my grandparents’ home. The dust seemed especially alive that day, stirred up by the buzz of activity preparing for my mom’s birthday celebration.

My Nane (pronounced “Nanny”—but spelled this way ever since four-year-old me wrote it out on a card) was in the kitchen, baking the birthday cake and cooking all of my mom’s favorite dishes. Meanwhile, my mom and I sat at the dining table. She was an incredible seamstress—truly brilliant—and was putting the finishing touches on a last-minute outfit she had decided to make for herself. I, on the other hand, was completely focused on my ice cream sandwich.

The television was on in the background, the massive wooden console kind, and it was broadcasting the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. I remember Mom pausing, watching the screen with wide eyes.

“Look at that train!” she said. “They say it’s the longest train in history.”

I squinted at the screen. I saw horses, carriages, and what seemed like millions of people... but I couldn’t find a train anywhere. This, I would later realize, was the day I learned what that kind of train meant.

“How long was your train, Mama?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing like that,” she replied with a smile. “Mine just went down to the floor.”

Then she got up and retrieved the wedding album from the shelf. We spent the next while flipping through the photos of her and my dad’s wedding day. As always, she walked me through each image with loving detail—what she was wearing, who the people were, why that moment mattered.

That’s when it hit me.

“Where am I in these pictures?” I asked, with all the four-year-old indignation in the world.

She paused, letting the question hang in the air just long enough for Princess Diana’s train to be wrangled one last time on the screen. Then she turned to me and said gently, “Well, baby... you were in Mama’s belly.”

It would be quite some time before I fully understood what that meant. But I do know that moment marked the beginning of a lifelong love of stories, photographs, and tables where memories unfold.