I attended the Park Slope Food Coop general meeting

Never Done: I attended the Park Slope Food Coop general meeting

The Park Slope Food Coop has 16,000 members, and each of us does a monthly work shift that lasts 2 hours and 45 minutes -- unless you do a maintenance shift (2 hours) or a really early morning receiving shift (2 1/2 hours.)

16,000 members. When I was growing up my entire hometown had 2000 people in it. Now it has 6000. My hometown was governed by open Town Meeting -- a form of democratic rule in which most or all members of the community (residents of the town) come together to legislate policy and budget for the local government. I used to love to go to Town Meeting with my parents and watch the Town Moderator (first Mario Barba and then Dick Cronin) keep the meeting civil, respectful, and somewhat efficient. As a little kid, I think I loved it most when that townsperson that everyone has -- the one who has an issue that they are going to bring up no matter what the actual agenda is -- the one who gnaws at that issue like a dog gnaws its bone, no matter what verbal and non-verbal clues they get from the Moderator and an entire auditorium full of people -- I loved it most when that person got up to talk.

People would shift in their seats. The people in the back would get up for water or a bathroom break. My mother, who would be covering Town Meeting for the Harvard Post (town newspaper at the time), would lean over to explain to me who this person was and what they really were on about, while discreetly (?) rolling her eyes to her friends nearby. I loved it. Drama! Conflict! Inappropriate public behavior! But in a context of community that transcended the conflict. A sense of community that says, "they might be the town fool, but they're OUR town fool."

I don't lack conflict and inappropriate public behavior in Brooklyn, but I do lack it in a small-town way, so imagine my delight when early in the proceedings in the ornately wallpapered room at Congregation Beth Elohim, two candidates for Coop Board of Directors spoke to us, and one of them was one of those people. Here he was, running for a seat on the Board, and all he wanted to talk about was how the Coop is a sham of a democracy. I felt the shift happen -- people got it that he was a little nuts, but nobody heckled and everyone listened while he spoke. One person even got up and asked him a question -- Could you give us specific examples of ways the Coop is not a democracy? -- and his answer was that the Coop's entire history is a specific example. And still, if people thought he was a little Looney Tunes, they didn't show it publicly.

I myself split my time between paying close attention to the general meeting, working on a writing project, and gabbing (until the woman in front of us asked us to stop whispering) with Tony Fanning, the boutique realtor who found us the apartment we're living in. I was most interested in a heated conversation about Membership Point of Sale Integration, which (and I quote here from a yellow flyer) will enable a person's member status in the Membership System to "talk" with the POS system, prohibiting members who are suspended with expired grace periods from purchasing groceries or making member payments.

The deal is, you have to work in order to shop. If you miss a work slot you have to do a make-up before your next regularly scheduled work shift. If you fail to do that, you might get two make-up shifts. People fall epically behind in their work shifts, and end up suspended from shopping (but still able to work themselves out of the hole.) But the thing is, people get around this all the time. They're supposed to be stopped at the entrance, but it's easy to get into the Coop some other ways. The way things are now, if you're suspended, the computer will still allow you to purchase food if you can convince a check-out worker to sell it to you. The new system would not allow the checkout worker to override the system.

Reactions were strong. We can't allow technology to override humanity at the Coop. It is unfair to would a person to come in and shop and get all the way to the checkout before being told they cannot. The onus is misplaced -- checkout workers, ill-equipped to deal with angry, frustrated, confused people, and facing lines of people waiting to check out, shouldn't have to deal with this. There are thousands of Coop members who do the right thing, so why shouldn't we get a system that deals with the ones who don't? In essence -- this was an ethical debate about privacy, technology, humanity and responsibility, with the membership overwhelmingly opposed to the new policy. I found myself somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, for a Coop with 16,000 members to function, we actually do all need to do our work shift, and I go to great lengths to do mine. (For years I commuted from Hoboken to do my Coop shift.) On the other hand, I don't think a mechanized solution is necessarily better than a human one, except where it might be. Could a mechanized system remove bias from the process? If you are suspended, you are suspended -- no matter your race, charm, or hotness. And it's not like the Coop has been immune from charges of racial bias.

But I didn't make my opinions known. Instead I sat in the back and listened, and read over the minutes from the last board meeting. Minutes that started with the wonderful summary: "A member raised a question concerning how price fluctuation affected the Coop and a question about kelp." The Coop might be the town fool, but it's MY town fool.

I was one of those cyclists

Never Done: I was one of those cyclists
Tshuve: I had the first wintergreen chip ice cream of the season at Erikson's

When I was growing up, I rode my bike everywhere, over miles and miles of hilly country roads, through orchards and past fields. I rode to school, I rode to friends' houses, I rode to work in neighboring towns. I think I'd say there was a bike riding culture in my town, but not a cycling culture. We rode in shorts and sandals or sneakers, and we didn't wear helmets. We didn't have toe clips, or shirts with pockets on the back. Nobody came to Harvard to train. We just rode bikes.

I was up in Harvard over the weekend (wonderful! wonderful!) and fit in two of my three training sessions. I took a wonderful run (3.7 miles, 40 minutes) the evening I arrived; I napped on the couch by the fire instead of going swimming on Saturday; and on Sunday I got geared up and went for my first ever training ride over the Harvard hills. I did my best to ignore the mental image of my mother rolling her eyes at me for my cycling shorts and gloves, as I set out on my little folding bike for a training ride. First of all, it was just wonderful to ride those roads again. I had sense memories of riding the three miles school (which used to take me 12 minutes, with a three-speed and a backpack; 30 years later, it took me 20 minutes, with a 7-speed with little wheels. I'm not sure what the comp is here, but it's likely that the only useful lesson is not to compare my 48-year-old self with my 18-year-old self.) At the beginning I thought about giving up and waiting til I have a good bike with normal-sized wheels. But I stuck with it, and I gave over to the limitations of my bike, and I ended up riding for 45 minutes, from one side of town to the other, from one dear friend's house to another's, from one Easter celebration to another, past many other cyclists and no other bike riders, riding the liminal space between two worlds -- my old town and the town it has become, still filled with people (and orchards and fields) I love.

And then later, on the way out of town, Josh and I stopped at Erikson's for the first ice cream of the year.

Never Done: I became Facebook friends with my high school Vice Principal

Never Done: I became Facebook friends with Mr. Stanley (my high school Vice Principal)

I have written before about the wonderful school I went to all the way from kindergarten through 12th grade. Well, I guess it was the school system I went to that whole time -- the Harvard public school system. What made it great? For starters, it was small; my class had just 72 people, and there were only 900 students in all of K-12. Also, the teachers cared about us. A lot. I imagine that teachers all over care about their students a lot, but our teachers were given certain liberties to show us. Maybe part of that is that it was the 1970s (plus one year in the 60s and one year in the 80s) and in some circles, inter-generational relationships were generally encouraged. My second grade class was an experimental class -- mixed grade, second and third -- and we called our teacher by her first name (Debbie.)

By the time I got to middle school, the opposition to the Vietnam War was in full force, and the high school kids who had their lockers right above mine were among the hippie protesters. They were also my babysitters and neighbors, and instead of feeling alienated from them or scared of them, I was filled with admiration and aspiration. In fact, I did eventually become like them, but it took leaving high school and entering college to get my hippie on. But let's go back to that little thing I passed over: I was in 5th grade -- 10 years old -- and my locker was under the lockers of the 17 and 18-year-olds. That is a cool decision that some school administrator made. The big kids looked out for us; we looked up to them, and we had continuity. Recently I've reconnected with a lot of these "big kids" on Facebook, and it's been great to notice that for the most part, age difference is almost no barrier when put in context of our common experiences of coming from Harvard, MA.

Recently one of these "big kids" recommended that I become friends with Tom Stanley, who was the vice principal when I was in school. Tom and I (except then I called him Mr. Stanley) had a special relationship. He was my math teacher, and he had my back as I went through that awful math transition that so many girls go through -- thriving to struggling. He believed in my innate math talent, and told me, and my parents, so. It was such a simple thing -- to say something positive and affirming to a young person (and particularly in my family, which had its share of math geniuses, and I wasn't considered to be among them) -- and it still encourages me today, 35 years later, when I encounter a tough calculation.

But there's a certain story that characterizes my relationship with Mr. Stanley, and the kind of leaders that he and Mr. Horgan (the Principal) were. I was a big college basketball fan, and in particular I was a Notre Dame fan, back when Kelly Tripucka and Orlando Woolridge were college stars. Mr. Stanley and Mr. Horgan were Notre Dame fans too. (I grew up around a lot of Irish people.) In 1980, Notre Dame made it into the NCAA finals, and some of the games were played in Providence, RI. The only way to get tickets (remember, this was way before the internet) was to go to the Providence Civic Center, and the only time to go was in the middle of the school day. So Claire and I went into Mr. Stanley's office, and I asked him for permission to skip school to go get tickets. (Yes, that's the kind of kids we were. We asked permission to skip.) And what did he say? He said yes we could go, but only if we got him and Mr. Horgan tickets as well. Because after all, it was more important that the Principal and Vice Principal to be in school than a couple of seniors.

I haven't been in touch with Mr. Stanley for probably 25 years, but I think of him often, and when I was prompted to send him a Facebook friend request, I did it right away. He in turn wrote back to me right away, calling my high school years "magical times in a magical place." They were. They truly were. Maybe that's why, as I am on the cusp of bringing a teenager into my life, I have such high standards about the home and school environment I want to provide.