Dinner Parties

I grew up in a home where Sunday dinner at one in the afternoon was always an occasion for us six children still dressed in the clothes we had worn to church joined our widowed mother and a number of adult guests to sit around our large dining table outfitted with the requisite linens and sterling silver cutlery that betoken the social behaviors of the upper middle class where we were served by a staff moving silently and efficiently with plates and platters all of which we children had somehow learned to manage and still carry on conversation.  When I was in my late thirties, early forties, a father of a family living in a large house adjacent to Boston, I was in the habit of inviting my friends and any friend of the children who were on hand to join me and usually five or six adults, and their mother if she had made it home from her architectural practice, to sit at our large dining room table, ornamented just as that in my childhood home, where I served up lavish feasts for which I was routinely praised by one and all.  We had no help and I did this all myself fueled by a lavish supply of martinis as I hummed to myself and moved the pots around in the kitchen.  Sometimes twice a week, too.  I remember all this as I confront my having invited a young woman and her fiancé to dinner Saturday.  She is vegetarian so I suggested spinach lasagna an easy dish which I remember having made a million times in the years past.  But truth to tell I am panicking.  After twenty years of preparing the evening meal for my husband, then my partner, who was still working whilst I was retired, I have got in the habit in the last five of letting him do an awful lot, because he was grateful and wanted to pay me back, and he is a damn good cook, and, well, let's face it, I have grown rather tired of cooking.  It is supposed to be bad for the elderly to eat out a lot because restaurant food is so heavily salted, but it's all so easy, and, yes, we do eat out a lot.  And the fact of the matter is, I really have somehow let the discipline of preparing a meal to escape me, and, now, confronted with a dinner for four on Saturday night, the drinks, the hors d'oeuvres, the lasagna, the salad, well, she is bringing the dessert, thank god, but still, my hands are shaking at the prospect.  I have been studying recipes on the internet.  Easy as pie, but will it turn out alright?  Frantic.  My husband says smiling that it will be a good experience, that I will love it once I get into it.  I don't know.