Democracy At Its Best!
On a cloudless October Sunday, I walked up to a barn in Maine’s rural western foothills with a couple of camp chairs. The barn was filled with many people who were new to me. But most all of them had been loved by a veterinarian. A veterinarian who had died and left a hole in their stables, their cow pastures, their lives.
I unfolded the chairs, sat in one, gave the others to the few friends I knew in the barn. Folks got up, spoke about how they didn’t like to speak in public – unspoken was how their love for the veterinarian surpassed their fear.
They talked about how the veterinarian believed in them, how generously she mentored them, how she loved condiments and birds and playing bluegrass. How she walked alongside them in the harder moments.
And it made me think about how I need to regularly tell people what they mean to me, how I want everything I say in a eulogy to be stuff they already knew.
We sang, “I'll Fly Away” and ate apple pie as October light seemed determined to bless every corner and cranny of that barn.
And when the celebration ended and the trash can filled with paper bowls and plastic forks, I went to fold up the camp chairs. But one just wouldn’t budge.
I pushed, prodded, flipped it sideways, upside down, but nothing doing.
A fellow I didn’t know in red sneakers saw me and came over, tried fiddling with the hinges, jimmying from this angle and that. But the chair wouldn’t give an inch.
Then another guy I didn’t know in a sweatshirt saw us trying to tame the camp chair and came over, pushed it against his knee, held it down with his farm boot.
And as he was fiddling with this stubborn chair, I got to thinking that a lot of people have a lot of softness lying just underneath the surface.
Then the guy in the sweatshirt called his son over to look at the chair. The son, a tall man in a hoodie, put two lean hands under the seat and the chair gently folded up in his arms, like it had been waiting for him.
How’d you do it?! I asked.
The son unfolded the chair, folded it back up, said without any judgment, Lift from underneath is all.
It’s said that we’re all just walking each other home. And sometimes we’re accompanied by folks who are totally new to us. Which any of us could do for each other, on any given day.
I thanked the man in the hoodie, put the chair under my arm, and left the barn filled with sorrows and love and three people who chose to make my problem their problem.
Which is a bit of what democracy at its best is, isn’t it? A refusal to let people go it alone.
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