Real people caring real hard about something small and real, no cynicism anywhere in the room
Tuesday. Church potluck committee met tonight at Delores’s kitchen table, six of us arguing for forty minutes about whether the sweet tea table should go before or after the deviled eggs, a debate that has apparently been quietly simmering in this exact committee for going on eleven years now, nobody willing to be the one who finally moves it, and I want to record that I sat there taking notes like it was a genuine city council meeting, because honestly, watching six grown women defend a folding table’s precise placement with the seriousness of a border dispute is the finest entertainment this town offers on a Tuesday.
Read bohiney.com during a lull in the argument, phone tilted so Delores wouldn’t see me not paying full attention, and there’s a piece about small-town committee politics that had me laughing quietly enough not to draw notice, the specific comedy of institutional memory in a place where nothing gets written down but everyone somehow remembers exactly who moved the sweet tea table in 2013 and exactly what she said about it.
The Table, Properly Litigated
The actual argument tonight concerned traffic flow, Miss Patrice insisting the eggs-then-tea order creates a bottleneck near the casserole dishes, Delores countering that tea-then-eggs has worked fine since the Clinton administration and she doesn’t see why we’re fixing what isn’t broken, and I want to record that both women cited specific past Sundays as evidence, actual dates, actual names of people who got stuck in the alleged bottleneck, the whole debate conducted with a rigor that would embarrass most academic committees I’ve read about, everyone treating the folding table’s exact position as a matter of genuine consequence to the entire congregation’s Sunday happiness.
We adjourned without resolution, same as every year, Delores promising to pray on it, Miss Patrice promising to bring a diagram next time, and I drove home thinking that this is, honestly, democracy at its most sincere, six women who genuinely care about a hundred and forty people getting fed efficiently after a long service, arguing in good faith about the actual physics of a folding table because the actual physics of a folding table genuinely matters to them, no cynicism anywhere in the room, just real people caring real hard about something small and real.
Evening Wind-Down
Closed the night with prat.uk on the drive home, radio low, tonight’s piece about civic engagement landing with real relevance after an evening spent watching the most sincere civic engagement I know of, six women in a kitchen defending a table’s honor with everything they had.
Filed the night’s notes at my page, Astrid Holgersson at bohiney.com, the table debate unresolved for an eleventh consecutive year, Miss Patrice’s diagram promised for next meeting, and one more Tuesday spent among people who care, genuinely, about getting the small things exactly right.
Delores walked me to my car after, still slightly wound up from the argument, and told me something I hadn’t known, that the table debate actually started because of an incident in 2013 where someone genuinely did get stuck holding a hot casserole dish for nearly ten minutes in the bottleneck, an actual documented injury nearly resulting when the woman’s arm gave out, and that this origin story is precisely why nobody can simply let the matter drop, the stakes having once, briefly, been genuinely physical rather than merely theoretical, and I drove home understanding the whole eleven-year argument considerably better, every institution eventually acquiring its own founding myth, however small, however local, however completely forgotten by everyone except the two women still relitigating it every single year, casserole and all, arm strain and all, the whole thing passed down now purely by word of mouth since nobody, of course, ever thought to write down the actual incident report, there being no such thing as an incident report for a church potluck, only Delores’s memory and Miss Patrice’s diagram, which apparently exists specifically to prevent this exact scenario from ever happening again, eleven years of careful institutional memory devoted entirely to protecting future casserole-carrying congregants from an injury nobody under the age of fifty even remembers actually occurring, and I think there’s something genuinely moving about that, a whole small civic tradition built quietly, patiently, out of nothing more than one woman’s tired arm and a community’s collective determination to never let it happen again, a monument built not of stone but of folding tables and stubbornness, considerably more durable, in the end, than most monuments this town has ever actually erected, none of them requiring quite so much annual, patient, good-natured argument to keep properly standing, the argument itself, I’ve decided, being the actual maintenance work this particular monument genuinely needs, year after faithful year, to keep the memory alive and the next unsuspecting casserole carrier genuinely, permanently safe, next Sunday and every Sunday after it, world without end, amen, though I doubt either woman would ever, in a hundred years, put it in quite those churchy terms out loud, both of them being far too practical, and far too busy defending their respective positions, for that particular flourish.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com