Sam Smith – On Sunday we had our monthly supper at a community club
that once was among our Maine town’s nine one room schoolhouses. Pot luck, no
program, and thirty odd attendees ranging from third graders to the retired.
After the supper we sat around and discussed a few matters
of mutual import such as choosing new officers, the favored design of an oil
cloth table cover replacement, and the best way to cut down on the
reverberations in the room.
As a kid on summer vacation, we would come here iwhen it was run
by the local Farm Bureau chapter. I remember especially liking the home made
root beer created in a big metal barrel with a large cube of ice. It was also
where I first learned about climate change, overhearing farmer Horace Mann
explain to a friend, “I still remembah that wintah of aught 8. We had our first
snow Octobah 25 and come May 1st we were still on runnahs.”
When I posted something about last Sunday’s meeting on
Facebook, a reader commented, “I knew I was almost
an adult when I was allowed to be a biscuit maker for the public dinner.. And
so many neighbors and friends were there for our wedding reception in 1967. The
tables look the same.”
I lived in one neighborhood in
Washington that had something similar on a less regular basis, but for the most
part the idea of bringing neighbors together for no better reason than to share
some meatloaf and desert and chat awhile seems antiquated. In our age of
strategic visions and bucket lists who has time just to get to know the people
down the road?
Yet, since moving to Maine full
time, I have been struck by how often the blending of the formal and informal,
the purposeful and the social, helps to keep the place friendly, democratic,
cooperative, and efficient. It seems, for example, that you can’t do business
in Maine without a anecdote or two traded among the participants. But it’s not
a time killer; it’s also allowing everyone to get a better idea of whom they’re
dealing with.
Similarly, farming and fishing,
mainstays in the state, are based on a combination of cooperation and
competition that an MBA would find hard to comprehend., But it works.
Every time I go to one of these
potluck suppers, I not only have a pleasant time but I learn something,
including more evidence that events don’t have to have much of a purpose to be
meaningful.
