This commentary is by Jules Rabin of Marshfield, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven.
Something lovely and, if you please, ancient happened to me yesterday, Sunday, on a quiet street in Montpelier.
I had driven in from Marshfield to deliver a big old round oak coffee table, once an antique in my wife’s family, to add to the furnishings of the house being provided for an Afghan refugee family due to arrive in Montpelier this week. With 4 small boys.
I was told to leave the table on the porch of a Montpelier couple who had volunteered to assemble such stuff for the newcomers, and who I knew would be away that afternoon. They, the “assemblers of stuff,” hadn’t known how big and unwieldy the table was and I didn’t know that their house stood on a steep rise, with two narrow sets of steps leading to the porch.
Heating with firewood, as I’ve done all my years in Vermont, and living a little rough on our back-road property, I’m used to bundling and trundling and lifting. But I’m also old and small. And as I stood at the foot of the first steps, with the table at my side, I wondered and calculated how I would negotiate the big round table up-and-up-and-up all those stairs. Roll it on its side? Lift it a step at a time? I felt confident I could do it, in the end. But with such trouble!
And then, as in a movie sequence, salvation appeared, on that quiet street, of a jolly, animated party of six or seven assorted people, from middle-aged to kids, some with hiking poles, walking in the middle of the deserted street with an air of carefree possession. Heading home for hot chocolate, maybe.
They and I were the only life on that Sunday street, and we exchanged glances as they approached and I stood there in my visible quandary, stuck at the foot of the first stairway, with that big hulk of a table. Maybe, maybe, I signaled with my eyes to them, from the table to the stairway … a question … a plea for help. However which way it was, they came toward me, diagonally across the street, the whole troop, curious and ready to assist.
And one member of the party, a big bearded guy of around 25, came to my side and with no more than six words exchanged between us (“BIG … TABLE … UP!”), if any at all, he understood my plight, and put his hand to one side of the table. We started to lift together, but that way seemed doubtful because the stairways ahead were so narrow. So – still wordless, me and the guy and the rest of the party – he lifted the table up and over his head, and walked it easily and without pause to the porch, and set it down there.
I think the only words spoken between me and the young man and the rest of the party were my “Thank you” to him. And we shook hands and took a good look at each other. And the whole troop of them continued their walk up the street.
I wondered at the whole episode, that wordless and complete understanding between strangers, about a-thing-needing-to-be-done. And its swift, easy-as-pie accomplishment, with almost no words spoken. That was Sunday, and I continue to wonder at it today, on this page.
