Non-Profit Eats

Time passing has a way of changing our perspective; at least it has changed my perspective in several ways. My wife turns 50 this month. Twenty years ago when she turned 30 I had a dozen black roses delivered by a woman in a black dress and veil. At the time I thought it was darn funny. I still think it was funny, then. Today I see things very differently. At 30 I had absolutely no concept or thought of the next 20 years. It seemed so far away that thinking about it wasn’t worth any time at all.

Today, I am hoping that we have another 20 years together. I am hoping to share at least another 20 winters with my wife and another 20 springs and summers and autumns. I am hoping to see my 20-year-old daughter graduate college, begin a career, meet a good man, get married, have children and be as happy and as I am with the life I share with my wife. I am hoping to see my 4-year-old grandson grow and mature and to see his dad, my son, continue to grow into the man I know he can be. I am hoping to continue to grow myself as well. I am hoping to be a better husband, a better dad, a better papa, a better friend, a better neighbor, a better man.

At thirty, 20 years seemed too far off to think about. At 50, 20 years is not nearly enough time left. My perspective has changed. It changed long ago. I realized many years ago that every minute of life needs to be used. Every minute needs to be relished and honored and taken advantage of, and remembered. Every minute of life needs to be treated with respect and with the knowledge that the next minute cold be the last-minute.

Twenty years ago, at 30 I thought I loved my wife as much as I possibly could. I was wrong. My love has grown for her every day over those 20 years. I see her with the same eyes but in a different light. I see her more clearly today than I did 20 years ago. I didn’t wear glasses 20 years ago but my vision is clearer today than it was 20 years ago. My perspective has changed. I am more aware of what I can’t see. I hear better what my wife is saying even when she is just looking back at me.

I will enjoy the next 20 years more than the first twenty plus years I have spent with my wife. I will certainly be more aware of the time passing and my perspective will no doubt continue to evolve and change and mature.

I love the “Christmas Season”. It’s not Christmas that I love, it’s the season. It’s the spirit of giving and charity, the infectious sense of anticipation, the overwhelming air of wonder, and the absolute surrender to caring about the happiness of others that can be seen in the actions and heard in the words of strangers and friends alike.

The problem is it’s gone just as quick as it comes. New Year’s has only just passed and the gloom of January has seemed to set in. I see it in the face of the driver next to me at the stop light and in the cold stare of the kid in the back seat frosting the window with each bored breath she takes. I hear it in the overheard return to life as usual conversations in the line at the bank and market.

Why isn’t January 10 just as great a day as December 25^th? For me it is. I live for everyday not just one day. Every tomorrow has the potential to be better than every today. I may be the eternal optimist but each day I am able to find something good. I can find an event, a happening, a minute that makes the day a better day, a good day. It can be as simple as a smile from a stranger or a get into traffic wave at a busy intersection or the sound of a distant laugh or the discovery of a ten-dollar bill in a jacket that I haven’t worn in months.

If we could carry with us the anticipation of the 25^th day of every month maybe we could find the happiness and the joy and the love of the “Christmas Season” all year-long. And, if it’s not the “Christmas Season” that does it for you find the happiness of your “Season” and carry it all year-long.

I resolve to be happy through the small happenings and stolen moments of each day.  I resolve to share my happiness with my family, my friends, and with those I don’t know. I resolve to celebrate life.

If you’ve never been to a hunter’s breakfast do yourself a favor and get to one.  I haven’t been hunting in over 30 years but I still enjoy hearing hunting stories and the best place to hear them is at a hunter’s breakfast.  Hunting stories are much like fishing stories, a little bigger, a little faster and all skill with no luck involved at all.  It’s not just hunter’s breakfast that I like.  I enjoy being anywhere that I can listen in to people of various skill levels who are enthusiastic about a particular hobby or activity talk about it.  It’s not just a learning experience but it’s a chance to share in another persons joy and happiness. 

While traveling the country in my youth I enjoyed having breakfast in small community diners, particularly in the Rocky Mountain Region and Midwest.  Sitting next to farmers and ranchers, young and old you learn a lot about the Country we live in as well as yourself.  You learn to respect the profession.  You learn to respect the hard work, long hours and toll it takes on the body and the family. You also get a sense of community.  The kind of community that you don’t find in the grid formatted town and cities that are commonplace to most of us.

There is an order and civility that is harder to find in the orderly gridded format that most of us are used to.  In these communities you are more likely to find a laborer living next to a doctor and lawyer than you are in the grid format.  In the grid format people with lower incomes get grouped together in low-income housing and people with higher incomes live in high-end condos and in high tax neighborhoods.  Neither one gets a chance to learn from the other or appreciate the lifestyle of the other.  There is something to be said about experiencing first hand how the other half-lives instead of guessing how the other side lives. 

If you get the chance to eavesdrop do it.  It can be a great learning experience.  Public meals like hunter’s breakfasts are a great place to eavesdrop and to learn.  It isn’t just about hunting stories but about life stories.  If you pay attention you can learn.  If you get out of your comfort zone and take a chance, you just may walk away with a new understanding of what you thought you knew.  Give it a shot.  Eat next to a stranger.  You may just find out they are not a stranger at all.            

     This week I visited Farmington to take in a game at UMF.  It’s a great place to watch a soccer or field hockey contest or to check out some club rugby and even ultimate Frisbee.  There are no fences locking in each field so you get a panoramic view of 4 different fields of action at once.  You’re able to change your position to better see a particular field without inconveniencing others and without having to navigate a maze of fences and obstacles.   Kids are free to run and play in the big open spaces and best of all there is access to the Sandy River. 

     During half-time of the game I walked with my grandson along the tree line towards the opening that leads from the athletic fields to the river.  As we neared the break in the tree line the ground under our feet began to crunch and crackle and  a familiar sweet smell began to fill the air.  The smell that the mix of brown brittle leaves and soft red and yellow and orange leaves gently emit when disturbed.  The smell brings to mind those days when raking leaves was fun not work.  When raking leaves into the biggest pile possible wasn’t a chore but a prelude to a dozen different activities from jumping and hiding in the mountain of leaves to stuffing a scarecrow.

     The leaf round-up always ended in the same way.  A final orderly raking of the leafy bounty into several small sporadically spaced piles of fall color. The rakes would then be gathered and placed under the biggest oak tree in the yard in a sort of Valley Forge teepee of rifles.  Then, each participant not deemed old enough would also gather under the tree and look on as the elders would one by one turn each little pile into aromatic mesmerizing smoky smoldering mounds of passing Summer.  

     It would be so nice if the things that occupied us, amazed us, thrilled us, and amused us as kids; still did.  I can’t remember when the things that were fun and enjoyable became work.  I wish I could forget it was work and rediscover the fun of raking leaves into a pile and just falling back into them and being enveloped by the aroma and emotions of childhood.  Maybe it’s a matter of just doing it, not treating it as a childhood memory but as a tradition of Fall.

Today is a great day for pumpkin pie and coffee.  It’s cool and damp with a light rain falling and the leaves have just started to take on a new and colorful life as they begin the migration to the ground below.  I am not sure if I am using the coffee to wash away the heavy sweetness of the pumpkin pie or if I am using the pumpkin pie to erase the subtle bitterness of the morning blend I am drinking.  It really doesn’t matter because they compliment each other so naturally and respectfully.

I don’t understand pumpkin spice coffee.  What do you eat with it.  It would be like having coffee flavored pumpkin pie.  It just doesn’t make sense.  For me it removes the essence of what a piece of pumpkin pie and a cup of coffee is.  It is the buffer that makes a difficult conversation less difficult.  It is the reminder of a cold day 30 years ago sitting in a hundred year old chair with a hand sewn seat cushion at an equally experienced table in a poorly lit, drafty, Greek revival style farmhouse kitchen that has been host to thousands of slices of pumpkin pie crafted from pumpkins grown in a patch at the corner of where the stone fence and the river side of the barn meet.  It is a continuation of a good meal with friends or family.  It is the comfortable reminder that at the end of a hard day that tomorrow will be a better day.  It is good.

Maybe it’s not pumpkin pie and coffee as much as it is pie and something and somebody.  Take some time out and have a slice a pie today  it’ll surely make you smile.

     With the 10 year remembrance of September 11^th just a couple of days away the media outlets are awash with opinion pieces, news articles, features, and human interest stories directly related or with some vague relationship to the events surrounding September 11^th, 2001. The underlying message of all of it seems to be that Americans come together in times of crisis.

     As I read, watch and listen to those stories I can’t help wonder what September 18^th be like. Do we just remember that we are Americans on days to commemorate horrific events in our Country’s history? Aren’t we Americans every day of the week regardless of the date? Why do we have to be Americans identified by race, ethnic heritage, sexual preference, religion, age, disability, gender, economic class, occupation, political ideology, and any number of other identifiers we use to pigeon-hole ourselves?

     Isn’t it time to just be Americans? Isn’t it time to get done the jobs that need to be done? Isn’t time to celebrate everyday, who we are? Isn’t it time to celebrate where we are from today not where we came from yesterday? Isn’t it time to celebrate our common ground? Isn’t it time to stop carrying a torch for our individual wants and desires and start lighting the way for our entire American community?

     I have traveled from coast to coast on more than one occasion and the grass is as green and the dirt is as gritty in Utah as it is in Ohio as it is in Vermont and the people are as helpful and as in need. I have never found one day better than another to be an American. Associating with people of like race, religion, political party, ethnic heritage, sexual preference and so on has just never been that important to me conversely it has been always been important to me that I am an American.

     I am proud to be an American and I want to act in way and contribute to my community in a way that echoes that. For me, I will be no more or less American nor will I be more or less proud to be an American on September 11^th than I will be on September 12^th. For me, to be an American is not a fleeting thought or feeling. It is with me always. I am a dad, I am a husband, I am a papa, I am a friend, I am a member of a community, and I above all am an American. I want to be an American every day, not just the days when it is fashionable or convenient or helpful to be an American.

Over the weekend I took a trip to Massachusetts to reunite with old college friends.  The annual reunions began for me 4 years ago.  It had been more than 25 years since I had seen or even talked to the people involved.  It always surprises me when I get the opportunity to talk to old friends or people I haven’t had contact with in several years how easy it is to fall back into familiar conversations.  The relationships seem to be uninterrupted regardless of time or distance. 

     These people were fast friends.  I spent time with them every day for a couple of years.  How is it that those friendships so important to us at the time are so easily cast aside?  As I take inventory of the many friendships I have had with so many different people over the years I can understand why I haven’t been able to “keep in touch”.  These were important people to me at the time.  They were the most important people in my life.  I moved, they moved and we all moved on.

     It’s not just old college friends that I have lost touch with its childhood friends and work friends and neighbors and the friends I made through my kids and community activities and volunteer work and in line at the grocery store.  It’s epidemic not just for me but for everyone.  We have become so good at replacing the people in our lives with other people.  And it’s not just the people it’s the community infrastructure that’s been replaced. 

     For example let’s look at something as simple as a neighborhood gas station.  I much prefer to pull into a place where they pump your gas at one of two pumps.  While the gas is pumping your windshield gets a going over and the attendant notices that your right rear tire may need some air and that’s not a problem because there is an air hose hanging on the side of the white-painted two bay cinder block building where oil changes and minor repairs are done.  It’s the kind of place where you tip the attendant for their effort and courtesy and because it’s twenty below with the wind chill or ninety-nine degrees with the heat index and staying in the comfort of the car is worth an extra buck or two.

     Though these places still exist they are far and few between with most being replaced by stop and go and pump your own gas mini marts with sandwich and coffee shops inside where you can get a shot of artificial energy, a lottery ticket, two aspirin for three dollars and a gray hotdog with rehydrated onions.  Conversation isn’t even necessary. You can slide a card outside and inside and never say a word and not have a word said to you.  The conveniences of a modern world aren’t so modern or convenient when it comes to the human factor. 

     It would be nice if we could better blend the ideas and realities of modern life with the ideas and needs of being human.  I don’t think it is nostalgic to want to have a face to face conversation with someone.  I don’t think it’s nostalgic to want to flip the page of a book to find out whodunit.  I don’t think it’s nostalgic to be able to multiply in my head or know what a syllable is or to appreciate seeing a work of art in person or to have all of my senses engaged when buying food directly from the farmer where it was grown and harvested or raised and fed.

     Whether it’s people or gadgets or food it seems that we so easily replace it for the newest model, technique, version design, color, flavor, packaging and so on.  As I get older I understand more and appreciate more that which is reliable, worn, used, familiar, faded, and otherwise familiar.  I like new and improved but wonder if old and reliable may not be the answer we are all looking for.

Better than 20 years ago when my wife and I were struggling to find ways to raise a young family on limited funds we invented something we called “adventuring”.  We didn’t so much invent it as we fell into it.  On a given Saturday afternoon we would belt the two kids into the back seat and ourselves into the front seat of our 20 plus year old 1970 Ford Torino and hit the road.  We lived in Virginia at the time and much like Maine there are miles and miles of interesting road to travel, and travel those roads we did. 

Adventuring involves getting lost.  It involves just driving until you find an interesting place to stop and eat your packed lunch.  It could be in a scenic view rest area overlooking a valley or a riverside boat launch or a State park or a fallow farm field with a collapsed barn and an abandoned farmhouse.  Those road trips were some of the best times I have ever spent in a car.  We would play the license plate game (it’s harder now with States having multiple plates), we sang songs, we played the alphabet game, we played 20 questions and I spy and that’s my car and that’s my house and we laughed and we had a fantastic time.

Last weekend I went adventuring with my grandson.  We drove along route 17 and 135 and 41 through Readfield, Fayette, Manchester and a half-dozen other towns.  We visited DEW Animal Kingdom.  We ate lunch at a roadside stand and enjoyed an ice cream cone.  We laughed and sang songs and had a blast for nearly 8 hours.  My 3 1/2-year-old grandson reminded me how rewarding it is to create a fun-filled day with just a few dollars. 

I was also reminded that the destination has never been the most important or most memorable part of my life as a dad or husband.  The most important, interesting and memorable parts have always been, still remain, and will always be, the journey.  Enjoy the journey.  Enjoy every journey and try to travel more route 41s and fewer route 95s because they are more interesting and there is less pressure to travel so fast that you miss all the good stuff.

     I love a parade.  In particular the small town parade.  The kind that features old tractors and old cars driven by old men.  The kinds that have cub scouts and brownies marching next to uniformed veterans.  The parades where fire trucks from surrounding  towns driven by friends and neighbors who volunteer to save our lives, our homes, and our community drive by with their big lights flashing as young kids look on with amazement and wonder. 

     This year I was at not one but two parades that featured people on riding lawn mowers.  Are you kidding me, riding lawn mowers.  It was great.  They got it and so did everyone watching the parade.  A parade isn’t supposed to be about corporate sponsorships and marketing it’s supposed to be about displaying the best of what our community has to offer.  It’s about kids showing off the patches they’ve earned and the trophies they’ve won.  It’s supposed to be about who’s running for sheriff and who’s opening a daycare, and who’s milking cows, it’s about hollering out the name of a friend, neighbor, or relative who gives a big smile and a wave as they do a two-step around a horse gift, it’s about all the individuals that make up a community.

     I am most alert when the candy throwers come through.  The kids dash from the side of the road to gather up the candy.  Moms and dads with two-year olds encourage their youngsters to join in but more times than not it’s mom and dad that join in.  Dum dum lollipops seem to be the candy of choice for most candy tossers.  It’s a good choice.  Dum dums are the perfect lollipop to toss into a crowd because when you get hit in the head with one it doesn’t really hurt as much as it surprises.

     A few weeks ago I wrote about the Turner birthday celebration.  I just want you to know it was a fantastic community event.  It was made better when I saw that Dort Bigg opened the animal museum.  There was community happening all over the commons area and if you want to see a guy on a riding mower in a parade, Turner is one place you can see that.  Whether it’s your community or not get to a small town parade this Summer.

     Today is my wife and my wedding anniversary.  We have never really celebrated our wedding anniversary.  Over the 20 plus years we have shared our lives we have missed the date several times.  It has just never been that important to us.  That we are together is important but we have never felt that the longevity deserved a celebration.

     The idea that we would celebrate the keeping of the promise we made to each other so long ago just doesn’t seem reasonable to me.  A promise is a promise.  It is one person assuring another person that something is going to be seen through from start to finish.  There may be ripples and bumps and challenges and work to be done do to keep the promise but the promise will be kept. 

     I still believe that a person’s word has value and worth and that a handshake is more concrete than a hundred page contract.  Some years ago I bought a house on a handshake.  Shortly after the handshake another bidder offered twenty percent more for the house.  The seller considered the offered and consulted her dad, who was 25 years my senior and that I had or have never met.  She told me her dad had one question.  The question was “did you shake the man’s hand”.  When she said “yes” her dad told her she had no choice but to honor the handshake. 

     That she consulted her dad said so much about where she came from and his response said so much about where he came from.  Where we come from isn’t just about our street address but it’s about our community.  Our whole community, including the people who are a part of our lives by default and the ones that are part of our lives by choice.  It is up to us to sort it all out.  It is our responsibility to decide where we are going, to decide our destination as opposed to trusting it to destiny.

     Tonight, as I share yet another dinner with my friend of over 20 years, I will quietly celebrate how I got to this destination with this person, my friend, my partner, my wife.  A promise is a promise and this is the best promise I have ever made.