Coffee hour meditations

Must hold out just a few more months. Can RantWoman do it?

A couple years ago RantWoman let people at her house of worship talk her into being part of the committee that has dominion over the kitchen. Dominion is almost certainly too strong a word. The kitchen is heavily used by several categories of people and dominion is just out of reach most of the time. RantWoman bought the line about not having to DO the work, just stay on top of some details and find other people to DO the work.

Nice try: Maybe SOME people have a charm function that causes people, when approached, to warm to the thought of dishwashing and coffee carafe scrubbing, but RantWoman somehow got overlooked when that flavor of charm was handed out. RantWoman does not even think it would be better if she could actually read the faces of those she would try to call on.

Everyone else who has ever done a stint on this committee says the committee just winds up doing the work a lot of the time. In fact there is a certain muscular satisfaction in tromping around the kitchen and banging things. The dishwasher, while fussy in small respects yields a regular stream of pleasingly clean dishes. Sometimes the company is entertaining. Sometimes clumps form of volunteers who can even sing as they press through piles of dirty coffee cups. Once in awhile RantWoman thinks of applying a bit of queuing theory to how the dishes pile up at certain choke points so puzzle brain gets engaged at least a little. Most of the time the wet dish towels get handled correctly before they turn into festering piles of moldy slime. Garbage removal seems to be like shifting sands in the Sahara, but RantWoman feels minimal obligation to do more than try to participate sensibly in that continuing conversation.

In other words, a lot of the time the gig is just a fine extension of kitchen prowess instilled in RantWoman ever since she was much smaller. RantWoman performs all kinds of wonders in her own kitchen. She does tolerably well at RantMom's and Little Sister's. When she is alone, she is even pretty awesome in the kitchen at her house of worship.

Of course, your typical house of worship not only tends to be full of other people, these people have a number of problematic traits. First, the very point of serving coffee after worship is so that people will mill around and mingle and bob around and jiggle and bounce and basically neither stay in any one place nor move predictably nor even dislodge themselves from key doorways no matter how many visually challenged RantWoman types there are about with sharp knives and carafes full of scalding liquids.

RantWoman herself falls into the second category. She hangs about the house of worship because she needs all the help she can get. In particular, when faced with masses of bobbing, weaving, earnestly conversating, clueless coffee drinkers while carrying carafes of hot liquids, RantWoman has a tendency to forget every word she knows in any language--except the very ones least appropriate for a house of worship.

Here we come to our third category: hopelessly well-meaning and peculiarly functional. Consider someone elderly and short and full of energy but unaware of how lethal a tall RantWoman's elbows could be if RantWoman made one wrong move. This person always has fascinating tales of the research and teaching projects she is still jetting regularly off too and taking the dish towels home in her car to launder at her leisure is just so much easier than RantWoman and the bus. This is ALMOST enough to cause RantWoman to forgive her for being obstinately unable to serve coffee by moving the coffee cart into the middle of the room rather than on the counter at the doorway where everyone piles up and RantWoman gets even more claustrophobic.

Ah but there's more. Some at the house of worship are hopelessly well-meaning and desparate to be needed despite other deficiencies. Consider Half-a-Brain lady. She is Half-a-Brain lady because the other half was doing her no good and basically making life unlivable.

Half-a-Brain Lady CAN be a fountain of information about how to get what one needs cheaply or other resources in the neighborhood. Half-a-Brain Lady can also be THOROUGHLY annoying in the "how could I possibly be annoying you" vein. Thanks to the miracles of brain surgery, though, even if Half-a-Brain lady detects that she is in fact annoying someone, she is utterly and completely incapable of remembering what she did that annoys you. Here RantWoman is forced to reflect on her own recent experience boring the chairman of a state Senate committee, but somehow, RantWoman needs to pretend that might be different.

But does Half-a-Brain lady stick to her wretched annoyingness so that one can feel saintly just for accommodating and putting up with her. No! No! No! Half-a-Brain Lady is very good about making sure there is a supply of her preferred non-dairy beverage adulterant. Half-a-Brain-Lady is always donating boxes of weird teas that someone seems even to drink.

Most of all, last week RantWoman somehow managed to put the ground coffee back into the freezer without getting the lid secured properly. Talk about coffee mess everywhere and bless Half-a-Brain Lady's soul. She helped RantWoman take everything out of the freezer, wipe off, sweep up and generally calm down and be patient even though RantWoman just wanted to run screaming from the room.

So maybe all that time at the house of worship is doing some good after all. Well RantWoman does not want to push her luck and the message has been received loud and clear: in a few months, somebody else gets to take up this mantle!