It was one of those events I tend to go to because I think I should. At the high school, we paid twenty dollars each for a seat in the auditorium so that we could listen to three women in goofy costumes display some of the sillier aspects of being a Lutheran in a small town. So I thought. Little did I know what was coming. When life calls for teachers, they will come. These came with a wake up call!
The twenty dollar gate charge went to community education in the three towns represented by the school, which charity represented a plausible reason for my being there. We watched the three cavort their way through various skits and situations they had cobbled together out of their own lives. Included was a mild-very mild-roast of three "volunteers" from the audience the women had gotten up on the stage. We pretty much all knew them and they knew us. Good sports all.
But there is this, I told myself. How many of the miserable politicians we have plagued ourselves with have ever laughed at themselves? How many of that crew of miscreants have ever knowingly exposed themselves to public ridicule? Or heaven forbid, taken it in good humor?
More to the point though, the evening featured normally dour old German farmers and grandmothers somewhat enthusiastically following along with a made up group exercise and dance routine rather than sitting in their seats furtively looking for someone else in the group that they knew making a fool of themselves. They actually followed along and tried to keep up with the rapidly increasing pace. This, of course,was completely out of character for us.
Perhaps most unusual of all, the three women on stage closed the program by exhorting us to continue to get together, to sing together and laugh at each other, and ourselves. And you know, a generation or two ago we would not need to have been told that. We expected to do that and we did it naturally.
But since, our farming and other ways of making a living in rural America have increasingly gotten in the way of such simple joy. We compete, we do not commune. Consequently our friendships have gotten fewer and considerably more shallow. Joy suffers. Human life suffers.
One of the saving graces in our lives, here at Pastures A Plenty, is that our group of customers is filling in, serving some of the purpose we so badly need in our lives together, providing us with friendship and support and ongoing commitment as our traditional rural life fragments and gets more problematic. And our customers are all across the spectrum politically as we have been able to learn in the process of dealing with them. Some of us would not deal with some others of us if it were not for our common belief in and commitment to the idea of good food and how that eaters knowing farmers and farmers the buyers of our foods is a very much stronger and more long lasting bond than we ever thought it would be.
We evidently needed three outgoing women doing a show of silly jokes and pranks to remind us of that. And for that, I am grateful.
