POOL TABLE

OUR DECISION TO BUY A POOL TABLE and put it in the dining room and haul the dining-room table upstairs and use it to pile stuff on was the sort of swift, intuitive decision that top family management makes when it is clicking on all eight cylinders.

“Let’s go look at pool tables,” my wife said one drizzly morning last month after we had canceled a vacation trip because we had too much work to do.

“Where would we put one?” I said.

She said, “In the dining room.”

And we went out and bought it—bam!—just like that. I was amazed, and so was the third member of the family, the fourteen-year-old youth. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.

In fact, I had been kidding a few months before when I said, sitting at the dining-room table, “This’d make a good poolroom.” She and he both laughed. Obviously, the room was a dining room, being near the kitchen and having a chandelier. In the creative end of family management, though, many great proposals are first made in the form of jokes, which serve to deflect initial resistance (“Only kidding, dear”) and allow the proposal to percolate for a period of time, until another member introduces it as a serious idea, and the next day two guys carry in a pool table. “Where do you want it?” they say. In there. “In the dining room? You sure?” Positive.

The canceled vacation was one factor in the decision—we felt we had some extravagance coming to us—and another was dissatisfaction with the basic dining-room concept. Of the rooms in our house, the DR lagged far behind the BR, LR, and Kit. in pleasure production. Its long table was where we sat with a stack of bills and wrote checks. We did income-tax returns there. We laid towels on it and spread out wet woolens to dry. And occasionally we sat there with company and put away big dinners, which were not bad—pretty good—and yet, considering the levels of fun experienced in nearby living areas, did not meet the performance standards we had in mind. Frankly, in our experience, when our pals sit down at a dining-room table set with matching china and matching silverware on a white tablecloth, they come under the shadow of a penal dining code learned in childhood. In the kitchen or out on the porch, they can be about fifty-percent funnier than at the table, where they sit up straighter and their conversation takes a turn toward higher ground—into the realm of issues and problems, needs and priorities. Frankly, the dining-room table was too much like other long tables I’ve spent time at, attending meetings. Frankly, in my own home my priority is to whoop it up a little. In those meetings, a major proposal such as dining-room conversion would be discussed at great length and considerably amended, the pool-table component would be set aside pending further study, and we would wind up with a long-term program of dinner enrichment, with new guidelines for guest selection.

This is the advantage of the family unit: founded on sexual attraction, which is unexplainable, the family maintains the capacity for swift, intuitive action, such as we’re certainly seeing a lot of now around our new pool table. The other night, I banked the eight ball off two cushions and between two balls slightly more than one ball’s-width apart to park it in the corner pocket where I had called the shot—a little exercise in intuitive geometry that made my partner gasp in admiration even as it cost her the game. A person doesn’t have a hot stick like that every night, and, of course, you don’t need to. Occasional amazement is more than enough to keep a family clicking along.