Town Meetin' Day

Art: Deb Marshall

Come the day, the town the Husband and I lived in back in the dark ages was eager for Town Meetin’. The Men and Women Who Get Things Done had worked magic: in the big schoolroom was a table for the Town Worthies to sit behind, a podium, folding chairs in rows behind the desks, and long lunch tables lined the hall.  On one side the Historical Society ladies sold loaves of bread, pies, cookies, jam, relishes. Opposite, the Church Ladies, who needed gear and table space, sold hot dogs, coffee, and never quite enough frosted brownies to citizens who didn’t want to travel home during lunch break and hadn’t come prepared. In the last empty space ladies from the Snowmobile Club were selling raffle tickets – win a pair of snowmobile boots!

The Minister paces, nervously thumbing a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order. This is not his usual rule book, and like his flock, the townspeople are not always willing rule followers. The Town Worthies – three selectmen, town clerk, tax collector, road agent, cemetery overseer, and overseer of the poor – several of whom are the same person – huddle, speaking in urgent, just audible voices. We wonder - what important matter requires a private conference? On Town Meetin’ day?

Older women arrive carrying comfortable lawn chairs. Their husbands take their old seats in the classroom, voting blocks of ancient friends, content with each others’ ideas on the issues; these are the seats of power and privilege. Late-comers are dismayed to discover their seats usurped by over-eager youngstahs, or worse, by newcomahs who don’t know any better.

The women each hold something – knitting, crocheting, a quilt section – to work on. The young mothers hover near the doors so they can make a quick exit with crying babies and shout at the children playing outside. Folks From Away all arrive early, nattily dressed in khakis and sport shirts with brightly-colored sweaters. They perch nervously on the first row of folding chairs, feeling like they don’t belong in this family gathering, but determined to prove themselves good sports by showing up and sharing their knowledge of zoning laws and taxes. Jan, long ago From Away, soon is nodding, asleep sitting up. 

The largest voting block stands four deep against the back wall: the Bubbas take the day off to defend personal freedom. These - the volunteer firemen, road crewmen, carpenters, and old cranks - are guaranteed to vote FOR new fire and road equipment, and with noisy arguments AGAINST all items increasing expenditures for the school, library, regional ambulance service, and any social programs the town might support. These men – warriors all – are the self-appointed conscience and arbiters of the town:  each objection they raise begins with a reminder that, in the past, we did just fine without all this pansy-assed new, expensive stuff. These defenders of a way of life have dressed for battle - lest anyone mistake them for someone with money in the bank - wearing their oldest, most tattered coveralls, greasiest billed caps, banged-up work boots. Their wives come only to sell raffle tickets; they already know what their warriors are going to say, and don’t care to hear it again.

The Poet sits near the door so she can slip out easily. The madwoman, seated largely in the very center of the room, whispers loudly to everyone nearby about some slight she’s suffered at the hands of the Poet. The Poet takes no notice. Leaning against the side wall, the farmers, a group of older men dressed in neat green work clothes, talk about barns and machinery and weather and seed potato. 

Finally the Worthies sit and the nervous Minister rises behind the podium and calls the meeting to order. As soon as he begins to speak, pointedly affronted shufflings and throat-clearings erupt. The church has undergone a rift, and some of the congregation have taken their souls elsewhere to be saved. These changelings want to make sure the Minister understands that though they’re at town meeting where he’s presiding, he shouldn’t expect to see them Sunday.

Joe snagged one of the geezer’s desks, and refuses to notice the stir this has caused. He gains the floor over and over to expound on matters he lards with Facts & Figures, arguing for progress and zoning and against town financial support of the Snowmobile Club. No one interrupts, waiting silently until Joe stops talking.They pointedly return to arguing whether the State has the legal or moral right to regulate septic system installation, and disallow a homeowner to dig a privy; and whether sports and music and art waste school time and town money. Joe, seeing that no one heeds his Facts & Figures, wonders if everyone in town is as stupid as they seem; everyone else in town, seeing that Joe can’t follow the discussion, wonders if he’s as stupid as he seems, or just determined to impose flatlander values. No one remembers Joe grew up two towns over, brother of lobstermen.

The meeting warms up; the Bubbas object strenuously to paving gravel roads, buying library books, and painting the school house – though they divide on this one, as two would expect to be hired to do the job. They campaign vigorously for a new fire truck and overtime for snowplowing. One allows as how he thinks anyone receiving welfare should man the volunteer fire department and grave-digging crews; another old crank moves we secede from the State and Nation over the privy issue.

The Poet makes an impassioned plea for support for the library; the mad woman counters with her own impassioned plea for library support, somehow contradicting everything the Poet just said.

The oldest warrior breaks in to demand to know where in hell the town had gotten the photo of the old church that’s on the cover of the town warrant, and he hopes to hell the town hadn’t paid one a them fancy photographers for it, because he knows for a fact he has some old photos lyin’ around the house if anyone woulda just asked, and the photo isn’t very good, besides. Sally offers to describe the old photos stored in her house since 1910; another old fart wants to know why the town spent money to print the warrant when the school has an expensive copy machine the town paid for two years ago and should be using for free. The president of the Snowmobile Club wants to know if the selectmen are aware that the school principal charges residents ten cents a page to make copies on that machine; and someone down front announces that his copy of the warrant hadn’t arrived in the mail until tomorrow. Within seconds half the town has volunteered that theirs, too, hasn’t arrived or just arrived, torn.

The Minister restores order. The town debates whether to zone the main road to eliminate junkyards. The owner of five junk vehicles and a rusty pile of spare parts parked on a lot across from the grocery store says he thinks it’s downright sneaky for Joe to try this route to get him to move his antique cars when Joe himself has a half-derelict building on his property. Joe stands and protests, interrupted by the junkpiler’s wife who opines it was Jan who offered this article, and she demands that the selectmen name their enemy. The head selectman stammers and hems, explaining that the article came from the zoning board. “That’s what I said!” shouts the junkpiler. “Joe and Jan and all the other flatlanders are on the zoning board!” He receives a chorus of righteous support from the Bubbas, defending the right of anyone to pile junk as high as they like on their own property, and they aren’t going to take their engines down outta their trees or move their spare tires outta the yard, neither. Jan sleeps through the battle and vote (overwhelmingly in favor of junkpiles), but wakes long enough to beg eloquently for money to plant flower bulbs and crabapple trees on town property – which convinces everyone that it was she, indeed, trying to abridge the God-given rights of junkpile owners. While everyone silently contemplates this, someone pipes up: she wants to know where the schoolkids got the money to buy a buncha evergreens she’d seen them planting, and why were they plantin’ trees during school hours, anyhow?

Soon the Minister calls a halt for lunch, several of the farmers sneak out, and the selectmen invite us to buy lunch from the ladies during our break. When lunch is over, very little remains on either sale table. The Snowmobile Club ladies pack up and go home. The Church and Historical Society ladies spend the rest of the meeting making a clatter and hushing each other as they clean up.

The day wears on, and we grow weary from sitting too long on hard chairs. We have to finish the business we started, however, so we shift and shift and shift in our seats, saying less and voting faster. We reject secession, zoning, paving and social reform; we agree to spend our mites on a few new books, some fancy equipment for the firehouse, snowplowing overtime, and even set aside enough for a few jonquil bulbs and a crabapple. We have examined and defended personal freedom and individual grievances; our impressions of each other have been reinforced; and in spite of that, we’ve enjoyed each other’s company and broken bread together.

Dusk has slid over our heads and lights come on up and down the streets. We vote the meeting ended. We welcome silence, and woodsmoke in the chilly air; we drift out of the schoolhouse, curiously light on our feet. The year turns on its hinge, the town will spin on for another twelve months, and in it we will dance our own dances, with each other and alone.

(Originally published in the Concord Monitor, February 26, 2017, as “Meeting Season.”