The Brunch

That was exhausting, and fairly loud. There was a harpist. I watched with great interest as she unloaded and set up. Awkward instrument. She had a padded hand-truck attached to the heavier back end of the padded harp. It was on its side, on a sheet of plywood that had blocks of foam glued on, to keep the unit from sliding. Handles on the plywood. The whole thing slides easily on the carpet in the back of a mini-van. The husband helps here for a total of 30 seconds: 15 seconds pulling it out to the tilt point and flipping it over onto the hand-truck unloading, and the reverse for loading. A very nice hand-truck, large wheels, well built, and she wheels it around quite well. Unstraps, unwraps, and I stash her equipage in the board room. This was all before nine o'clock this morning, she said the instrument needed to acclimate before she tuned it. She was back at eleven (the event started at noon) to tune it. She tuned it by ear, I suspect perfect pitch. The food arrived at nine, with eight workers and a supervisor, and I fetched various things that people needed. I grazed rather extensively. The sausage balls (with a horseradish sauce I'd saved from another event) were excellent; the omelets were cooked on too high a heat but what do you expect when making custom omelets for 120? Lots of bacon. Biscuits and gravy. Excellent ham, of which I got all the trimmings for a pot of bean soup. I didn't even look at the sweets, but there were a lot of them. Debbie gave me an entire Kringle, when we were cleaning up, a pastry the size of a very large cow paddy. At the end of the party, as things were thinning out, I mingled a bit, as I knew everyone there, and I had my own stash of whiskey upstairs. Some interesting conversations, nothing deeper than a sweet potato or higher than a roasting ear, but an exercise in civility, wherever that fits into the great scheme of things. That Wyeth painting, "Wind From The Sea" blows me away. He's left out everything and yet it's complete. A neat trick, if you can do it; a salt lick, picking blackberries, walking down a country road.