Let’s Have Some Real Palaver on Labor Day
Given the straitened circumstances of Labor Day in America this year, many (if not most) of us are not gathering in our usual ways. In a standup routine Steve Martin once talked about how he had taught himself to juggle. People asked “Where do you find time for that?” He said “I juggle in my mind.” That is how I’m spending the holiday today.
In my mind I have journeyed back twenty years to another Labor Day on the Maine coast. It turned out to be our last year of a long tradition in which we would attend, with another close family, the annual rustic camp out put on by the adoption agency we had all used.
We had all, to one degree or another, blended families intentionally, and this weekend was a celebration, an annual pilgrimage to the Maine Coast causing an automatic blocking out on our calendars of the days around the final weekend of the summer season. It was dependable, like some old favorite uncle’s house or your parents’ phone number. On Labor Day weekend you started driving north and there was a place for you. No need to call first. Just show up.
I wrote in my journal “I sit down in one of the camp chairs and observe the congeries around me. The evidences of rustic, camp life by the Atlantic Ocean, with four adults, five children, and two dogs. Mini frisbee, upside down on the grass in the center of the circle of chairs, filled with empty peanut shells, open bag lying on its side nearby; bikes left in a jumble on their sides; sweater, now not needed, draped over a chair. On the picnic table I see assorted rocks and seashells, mustard squeeze bottle, hand mitts, overturned dishes long since dried from morning washing, paper plates, blown out of their wrap by the freshening wind, now picking up out of the southeast, over the Beal’s Island Bridge and sweeping the fog into Kelly’s Point.
A wet fog had rolled in Saturday night, the tell-tale signs of which were in evidence Sunday morning. I was observing the puddles and streaks on anything left out all night. The sodden paper bags, the glistening tents, and the damp grass, a line from The Sound of Music (“My Favorite Things”) came to mind unbidden. I thought about how all year these memories are a few of my favorite things, part of my inner life. It’s hard to forget how much fun these smelly one-holer latrines are, the wet mornings, the hungry bugs, but they are also part of what draws us all back year after year to this place. There’s a comforting ritual about it, even a sacredness, that we can’t imagine life without.”
Sweet memories, those.
There was a communal structure there called the Palaver House that seemed to always have a fire going, sometimes a smoky one, if the chimney and flue weren’t cooperating. I was thinking of the word palaver and how useful it might be to resurrect its use.
The more contemporary meaning is idle talk, as in “Cut the palaver and get down to business.” But, historically, the sense was “a long parley usually between persons of different cultures or levels of sophistication.” We could use a little more of that right now.
However you spend today, maybe these words of Bell Hooks will be helpful–“Finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” Some real palaver, instead of contentious idle talk.
