MEEKER | I occasionally view my life as one big potluck supper. It wasn’t only the main dish and the sides that made these memorable, it was the variety of friends and neighbors who gathered together and took time to see each other during busy times. In the midwest, potlucks and church fellowship get-togethers went hand in hand, and over the years I’ve spent in the rural west, potluck suppers were really summer picnics with everyone sharing their specialties. I miss those get-togethers.
Now during these strange times, the inability to get together with friends and share a meal makes me even hungrier for reinstating that tradition. Each family, whose upbringing involved regular potluck get-togethers probably complained about them copiously. I think I took them for granted, as growing up in a noisy household with four siblings, I didn’t lack for lots of social interaction..
Our official potluck dinners were held at my grandparents’ church in the fellowship hall. Most families brought different side dishes to the meal. Some of those contained foods we never got at home, so broke up the boredom of all of the family time reserved for Sundays. That was the time, when everyone in my grandparent’s generation honored that day as a day of rest.
This summer the annual barbecues or picnics, as well as the church potlucks will most likely be restricted. The newest twist will be coming up with everything you have on hand. Friends and families will probably only be able to invite you to a big backyard or park that is open, where they will be ensuring an entire meal is available. Sure, there are the real organizers among us, who could set it up like the progressive dinner of the old days. That way, everyone would move from yard to yard to have appetizers, main dish and sides, and dessert in different places with their family recipes.
That sounds like an awful lot of effort though, so I am not sure that after all of this social distancing, we should expect anyone to step up and become responsible for that working for everyone. While popular culture continues to sprinkle life’s unpredictability with well-known movie mantras, life may not be a box of chocolates, after all. Now there is a very different reason. There may still be varieties of shapes and sizes of bon-bons in a full box, but after all this time staying-at-home, most households emptied those boxes a long time ago.
By Dolly Viscardi | Special to the Herald Times
