We all have lots of lists.
My favorite is top secret: it’s The List of People I’m Gonna Have to Kill One of These Days. The bad news is that it’s not a very nice list. The good news is that you’re not on it. Yet.
But the one I think of most is The List of Love Letters I Want to Write One of These Days.
Some would be to people. But like your list, my list would have places on it, and places within places.
Thought of this the other night at the Ruston-Lincoln Chamber of Commerce’s 105th Annual Awards Banquet. I’d missed the previous 104 so figured, you know, why not?
Didn’t know what I was missing.
I know, I know. Chamber of Commerce Banquets are boring. Long speeches about taxes and civic improvements and per diem and e pluribus unum, and tacky jokes about the die-hard crew in accounts receivable.
While this can at times be as unavoidable as cottage cheese on pear halves at the church picnic, we think it wise to remember that — as Broadway’s Gershwin brothers insisted — it ain’t necessarily so.
Yours truly has been fortunate to visit, at least once, the Chamber banquets in many places where my love letters are due. These include Caddo and Bossier, Webster and Claiborne, Bienville and Jackson and DeSoto.
Some were held in high school gyms, some in church rec halls, some in civic centers. I remember, specifically, pieces of each. And every one, in ways sentimental and homespun and sincere, was meaningful.
Even if one or two went longer than it maybe should have, each counted. Each meant the world to somebody, to some civic soldier running below the radar, bringing home the goods, day after day after day.
Being a bit of a different animal, Lincoln Parish and the Chamber folk there basically threw a wild party that was over by 8. Who knew “wild” and “done by 8” could co-exist?
Doors opened at 5, dinner was a buffet at 6, the program started at 7 and was over by 7:50. That means that although it was a long day, hundreds of friends and families who do business with each other got to hang around and eat and talk, enjoy a short program highlighted by a few professionally done videos, honor and applaud wildly for the most recent of a bevy of over-achievers among us, count their blessings, and skedaddle home.
I’m told the wildest of the bunch hung around until 8:20 or so. And on a Thursday night!
Support your local Chamber? We sure hope so. What I know about business is nothing more than trying to mind my own. Chambering? No clue. Commerce? Please. BUT …
I see loyal friends and families taking chances, investing in their communities, investing in each other, embracing the challenges of the day and, in doing so, pouring their hearts into the hope of tomorrow.
They’re making our local world go around.
How can you help but write love letters for that?
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu