Company
Blogging, to me, seems a bit like a professional ball player's hitting: it's streaky. When you're hot, the incoming pitch looks like a beach ball heading towards you and you can effortlessly bang out line-drives like nobody's business. But when you're slumping, you've got nothing to show. I guess that's why February was a killer month with eight of my little blog musings and March was something of a bust with only three all month—two of which came in the first week and were, therefore, almost like run over from the hot streak in February. In this case, though, it wasn't because of a lack of ideas. Just a lack of time. Things got busy at work and remained busy outside of work. So every time I had a notion to write about something, I just didn't have time to put ink to page—or fingertip to keyboard, to update the phrase for this day and age. But I'm on my lunch break right now and I'm back and will try to get something going. It will start with these thoughts on "Company."When I was growing up, it seemed like my parents always had "company" coming over.
"Clean up the house! We're having company tonight!"
I'm specifically NOT talking about large parties of more than 5 or 6 guests. Those are dinner parties or, perhaps, "regular" parties, if they're big enough. And they have their own social quirks that differ from regular "company." When I say "company," I'm talking about just a handful of friends: anywhere from one other couple to maybe 6 or so guests.
That's what they were talking about when they had "company."
Well, now that I'm an aging adult who is either middle-aged or approaching middle-age (depending on who you ask), I've noticed that I don't really have "company" and probably never will. Oh, I have people over, and it's basically the same kind of thing that my parents had—but we don't call it "company." We call it "people coming over." Or we say that we're "hanging out," and we just happen to be doing so at our place.
The latter is kind of a funny expression to be using when you think about it, isn't it? At 34, I'm using the same lingo as I did when I was 14 or 15. In fact, if you think about it, for many of us, "hanging out" became the catchall phrase that worked for everything once we decided that "playing" was too juvenile-sounding. In the real youthful days, we choose "play" as our word, as in "I'm going out to play" or the ultimate phone proposition for mega-minors: "Play with ya?"
So "hanging out" followed "playing" and it has seemed to remain. It still is a catch all phrase that works all these years later, meaning "getting together in an informal manner."
Now, if you caught the word "informal" in that last line, you're onto something. Informality has a lot to do with it. Society has changed to a more informal one. We thought our grandparent's generation—the one when our parents were kids—to be a stuffy, uptight, and formal kind of place where guys wore a shirt and tie to go to a birthday party. But we've progressed beyond the environment that our parents knew when they were our age, too, and we're even more informal than they were. Consider...
The company my folks used to have was nothing more than their friends; other adults they knew and liked to spend time with. Just like my hangout folk. But my folks lit candles and seemingly always made a semi-elaborate dinner and offered to hang up their friends coats in the closet. We simply straighten up the place, get take-out about as often as we cook, and let our friends throw their coats on the couch. Or sometimes we offer to take their coats, but we normally just throw them on the bed in the other room.
Their friends were always offered cocktails. We offer something much less pretentious. I don't even know how to make a mixed drink.
And their friends all sat nicely and properly on the couches and chairs. My friends and I sometimes do that, but sometimes we'll lay on the floor or slouch back in the chairs in a half-sitting, half-laying kind of position. I just couldn't picture one of my parents' adult-friends doing that back in the day.
Maybe it's just the way I am remembering it because I had a kid's perspective, but I don't think so. I think my "company" is a lot more informal and a word like "company" sounds too stuffy.
But doesn't this make sense? We've gotten more relaxed as a society as a whole. When I was growing up, I called all my parent's friends by "Mr." and "Mrs.," and not by their first names. I *still* refer to them that way, if they're people I knew from back then, just the same way you still refer to your teacher as "Mrs. Jones" when you reminisce with people from your school-days. It's what you called them then, so it's what comfortably rolls off your tongue now.
But that seems foreign in today's day and age. It would seem strange to request that a kid call my friend "Mr. Smith" or that John Smith's kids would do the same when referring to me (unless I was their teacher—as school is a place where that social norm still exists).
The way it worked back then—in my household and the households of the friends that I had—was that every parent or adult was "Mr." and "Mrs.," with the exception of that one friend of the family who was really, really tight with us and too involved in the inner circle to be a "Mr." or "Mrs." So hey became an "AUNT," as in "Aunt Joan" or "Aunt Sue." We all had that one aunt who really wasn't your aunt. Heaven forbid we simply called them by their names. (And, yes, they usually were women.)
So...we're definitely more relaxed, and that's probably why "company" has gone by the wayside. Ironically enough, in the time between when I thought of doing this blog entry and the time when I got around to writing it, we probably had what seemed to be the most "company"-like situation I can ever remember having. The folks who came over were another family similar to ours and there was a slight sense of it feeling like "company." But that's because they are relatively new friends and they're a couple of years older than we are and it seemed a little more formal. However, I can guarantee you this: if we keep seeing them, we'll become more relaxed and more comfortable, and before you know it, they'll simply be coming over to "hang out."
posted by Steve @ 1:48 PM
3 Comments:
I never really thought of it that way before, but you are right. We don't have company over for dinner, we hang out with friends. We would probably all look at you funny if you lit candles and started offering us mixed drinks, and I admonish Paul all the time that he doesn't have to go on a mad cleaning frenzy just because we are all going to his place. It is "just us, why clean?" I h ave to wonder what our generation's kids will be like though. Will it get more informal yet, or will things revert to a certain degree of formality? Can we even go back to being formal, now that we have broken down that barrier?
I know exactly what you're talking about. As a child, I often went with my family to other's homes for dinner. A table cloth was always used, and nice silverware and plates were always set upon it. In addition, the people we went to see usually had a kitchen table and a dining-room table -- the first for them on a normal day, the second for when company came over. We had a second table as well, and it was always a more formalized setting than what we used for, say, breakfast. And when people ate over, it was always a multi-course meal with meat, potatoes, a casserole or two, vegetables, bread, coffee and dessert. Now? Pizza and soda and iced tea, on paper plates at a back-yard table or, if the weather doesn't permit it, at the same table where I eat my cereal in the morning. By the time my kids have their own families, people will probably eat out of troughs when they visit each other, then wipe their faces on the furniture.
Rich, we also had that "Dining Room Table" vs. "Regular Kitchen Table" thing going on, too! That's an excellent point that plays right into this kind of thing we're talking about.
Funny, we didn't even have a dining room to put the dining room table in, but my mother felt the need to have that sort of "formal company" table so much that she just put it in the back of the living room. Which seems weird, but it somehow worked. So, when it comes right down to it, it was pretty darn ironic, considering the familiar "no eating in the living room" rule was enforced in my house, and yet when company came over, that, tectnically, is exactly what we did.
In this day and age, unless you own a small mansion with more rooms than you know what to do with, it seems crazy that someone would dedicate a room of their house to put a second table in. We could do it, as we have that second 'living room" in our set up, but so far it seems like that would be wasteful. My friends don't seem to mind eating in my kitchen, even when we do have home cooking.
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