Periodic table The important things we learn from our elders BY ALAN OLIFSON

I miss the Kids’ Table. Of course, every family has its own schematic variation on this theme. There’s the satellite layout, with the kids set off to one side in a containable geographic area — usually a wobbly card table — where they can be seen, heard, and easily ignored. Some families go a step further, opting to set up the table in an entirely separate room, more of a Lord of the Flies approach to the holiday in question. If the party ends and no one’s head is on a stick, I guess everyone wins.

Our holiday geometry was a T-shaped affair, my grandmother’s heavy oak dining-room table serving as the top. A slowly deteriorating array of folding tables and chairs would then splay out to form the base. We masked the inevitable height differential between tables with an equally deteriorating array of tablecloths. The Kids’ Table was the area at the base of the T — not surprisingly, this was usually a wobbly card table. (Come to think of it, I challenge anyone to show me a non-wobbly card table.)

During these Kids’ Table years, my grandmother taught me how to play poker. Over dessert — in my family defined as the four hours after dinner in which everyone drinks a frighteningly excessive amount of decaf coffee — I would make my way up to the head of the table. It was here, regardless of the solemnity of the holiday, that I’d find my grandmother and her brothers and sisters — the historical, emotional, and genetic center of our family — playing cards.

I was always impressed that even on Yom Kippur — Judaism’s most sacred and solemn holiday — this crew didn’t think twice about breaking into a good game of seven-card stud, low ball. Gambling in the face of God. That’s the kind of flagrant disregard for religious etiquette that can only come from knowing you’ve already paid your penance in life. They were beyond reproach. Hell, they were the keepers of reproach — they hosted the dinners, they led the Seders, they dictated tradition. What the hell did we know? We were Americans.

They came from the Old Country.

I was 14 before I realized not everyone over 60 spoke with a Polish accent. And I still forget that some grandmothers teach their grandkids a good cross stitch instead of how to bluff on a low pair. My sister and I called this generation the Alta Kockers, or "AKs" for short. It’s a Yiddish term that means "old fart." But in keeping with the beauty of Yiddish, it has simultaneously derisive and endearing overtones.

They were all over 70, under 5’6", and varying degrees of hunched. My grandmother herself couldn’t have been more than 4’11". She sometimes reminded me of a giant Polish-grandmother stuffed animal you might win at a carnival — "Ooh, ooh, Daddy, pop one more balloon and win me the Bubbe doll! When you squeeze her she giggles and says, ‘Oy, my little shayna punim.’"

The whole lot of them worked in my grandmother’s garage making drapes. I don’t even think there are zoning laws covering the kind of operation they had going on back there: five to 10 retired immigrants working in an unventilated garage on heavy machinery dating back to the Hoover administration. But to me, it was normal. I figured everyone’s grandmother ran a sweatshop in her back yard. My sister and I spent many a Saturday afternoon running around with magnets tied to the end of a stick, picking up stray pins and needles for five cents apiece — surely violating about 37 different OSHA regulations in the process.

The AKs moved to the US from Poland in the early half of the 20th century, though "move" is too quaint a word for what they did. It’s not like they bribed their friends back in the shtetl with beer and schnitzel to help them load up the U-Haul. Theirs was an 18-year journey beginning with my great-grandfather and some fuzzy stories about debtor’s prison. He came to — or quite possibly escaped to — the US with his oldest daughter. Then, one steamship ticket by one steamship ticket, he sent for his wife and each of his other four children, oldest to youngest, ending with my grandmother.

Over poker I’d hear great stories about the Old Country. To hear them tell it, it was a magical, prewar land, where Jews lived separately but in peace with their oppressive yet lovable gentile neighbors. Even stories that amounted to graphic scenes of bigoted oppression somehow took on a detached Old World charm when told between spells of bickering over who shorted on the ante. I pictured my family being chased around by an old bald guy shaking a stick, everyone running in that time-and-a-half silent-film speed, like a Benny Hill episode.

Recently, my grandmother passed away. She was the last of the Alta Kockers, having outlived her siblings, sweatshop co-workers, and poker buddies by more than a decade — a decade of amazing vitality. ("We should all be so lucky, kine ahora," as she might say.) And with her passing, along with grief comes the stark realization that we have all moved up a generational notch in my family, putting me one seat closer to the top of the T.

To be fair, the Kids’ Table has been on the wane for years — starting when many of its denizens began having kids of their own, such brazen displays of adult biology being wholly unacceptable within the table’s borders. (I mean, really, people at the Kids’ Table should not be breast feeding.) But with my grandmother gone, the change has suddenly become so much more concrete, so much more final.

My parents and their generation are the Alta Kockers now. And if our current holiday patterns are any indication, the same kind of fondness I have for poker, my kids will have for conversations about back-pain remedies, perhaps getting a little teary-eyed at the mention of trying Pilates. I can’t even imagine what stories I’ll be telling my grandchildren when I assume a seat at the head of the table. Maybe we’ll play video poker as I pine away for the good ol’ days, when people lived above ground and robots weren’t evil. Who knows?

Whatever legacy the next generations carve out for themselves, I doubt it will match the sense of center and Old World charm the Alta Kockers brought to the table. Lord knows it will lack the card skills.

Alan Olifson can be reached at alan@olifson.com