Pop 89: The Resurrection of Supper at the Seniors

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

Last night we had our first community supper in two years. For twenty bucks you got a slab of roasted ham, a scoop of scalloped potatoes, fresh peas from the Hutterites, coleslaw and a slice of pie or a brownie. Plus a beverage. Need I add it’s homemade by the women of Val Marie in the back kitchen of the Seniors Community Centre, just two doors down from me.

I feel like knocking on the door of the town man whose trailer is parked between me and the hall, just to make sure he doesn’t miss out on an opportunity to dine among locals again. When I arrive there’s Pat at her old post, manning the cash box and reading a History magazine. I spot Annette and Jacquie and Ervin Sr. at one of the long tables facing toward the hills turning golden as the sun goes down.

“Dining out! Yippee!” I say as I plop myself beside Jacquie, who is always game for an evening out. “You said it!” she laughs. We both wonder why anyone would order take-out, only to schlep back home and sit at alone at their table or in front of the tv. Annette agrees, and we grouse about how living alone means eating the same thing three nights in a row. Apparently, for us, cabin fever is worse than Covid, or maybe we just decided that this is the new normal, to use a hackneyed phrase. As if there once was a place or a state called normal.

I peek into the kitchen, half-hoping the old pancake breakfast gang will commission me and I can pull out the apron I stashed in my handbag on my way out the door. But the kitchen is already buzzing with efficiency. The women have everything under control. And there’s Maurice too, who is always at the heart of the Centre’s events, tongs in hand, wielding them like an orchestra conductor. “Soon we can do pancake breakfasts, right?” I ask him.

The thought of reviving our Sunday tradition brings Paul Emile to mind, wandering from table to table and winking as he slips a capful of Bailey’s into cups of coffee. Tonight, Joy, his widow and Paulette, another widow, busy themselves filling plates with potatoes and slaw. And I think: here’s another of many firsts without their husbands. First supper at the Seniors.

Betty sets a plate on the table for me and I notice she’s given me a wee bit more ham than everybody else. Thank-you, Betty. I could eat a plate of just ham when it’s this tender and sweet. Apologies to the pig. The usual culinary discussions ensue: “ I can never get my ham this tender,” and “I love how he does his coleslaw”, and “Do you use mushroom soup in your scalloped potatoes?”, “The pie is perfect, not too sweet. I don’t like pie that’s overly sweet.” I find the talk as comforting as the food.

When’s the last time we all got together? we ask. “We all” being the village, which could fit into this room. Gosh, Valentine’s Day, I guess. Oh that’s right. I sat beside Jacquie then too. But mostly, we’ve been robbed of our community gatherings: No Lion’s Christmas Supper at Palais Royale, free for seniors, with its giant buffet of turkey and fixings and its concert of tiny violinists on the stage where still sags the backdrop I strung from end to end for my performance of Mather’s Apron back in…whenever that was.

There’s been no casinos, no wedding receptions, and despite the alarming number of deaths these past winters, no funerals. Except for one. Women prepared sandwiches and squares, men delivered jars of pickles, only to see the trays still heaped with food after everyone left. Most of the mourners were squeamish about eating finger food. (Once again, I can’t say it stopped me. I will eat egg salad sandwiches by anyone willing to peel hard-boiled eggs.)

Now that we’re mid-Lent (for those who follow the Paschal calendar) I can’t help but reflect on Easters past. Usually I look forward to the preceding forty days of living a leaner, quieter, solitary life. But our lives have been so bereft of celebration and community for so long that I seem to have forgotten to fast this Lent. I want to go directly to the resurrection of past Easters spent in packed churches filled with spring flowers, followed by a feast shared by the entire family.

Still, it’s worth noting the importance of the fast. I’m reading a big fat book about “the station churches of Rome”. There are enough churches and chapels in the ancient city to visit one each day of Lent. And it’s only in the past fifty years, thanks to the insistence of Canadian, American and Australian seminarians, that the pilgrimage walk, every morning at 7am, to a different station-church, was re-instated.

The Lenten pilgrimage, writes the author George Weigel, is an opportunity to live a “second naïveté: the wonder of an adult on the far side of cynicism, grasped by the truth of legends, stories and myths.” And those stories repeat a theme of forty days in the desert, a desert full of temptations to power, to sloughing off responsibility, or to reject life’s inevitable sorrows. Whether experienced by Moses, Elijah or Christ, all the forty-day stories are examples of “confronting the darkness that impedes us from making our lives into a gift.” Of living in the light of love and kindness toward others.

Still, it’s hard to be a gift toward others when we can’t break bread together. And when we finally can, as we did at the Senior’s, we are all eager to roll up our sleeves and get silly in the kitchen with each other, as did those women last night.

I coming to view the forty days of Lent as a metaphor for the two-plus years of Covid. And I look forward to the resurrection of the community and more community suppers!