On being a good host

I have been thinking about hospitality a lot.

First and foremost, because it feels like we’ve dealt with more than our share of grief and loss in our little community lately.

Growing up here on the prairie, you learned early that death and hospitality were inextricably linked.

Someone died, and hot dishes just started appearing.

I was deep into my 30s and living in Florida before I saw cars not pull over for a funeral procession. And I will always remember, after my grandmother passed, going to stay with my grandfather with a stealth mission from my mother: See what he is eating.

It turned out grandpa could feed himself — but it also turned out that all the casseroles that had turned up after grandma passed were still piled up in the drop freezer on the mud porch.

“I don’t want to eat those,” he said. It wasn’t that he was a picky eater, although he was, if only by the standard of a man who grew up during the Great Depression.

He didn’t want the reminder. But he wouldn’t throw away food, either.

“We can toss the stuff, grandpa, but those ladies are gonna want their dishes back,” I told him.

***
Still, I didn’t learn the biggest lesson about death and hospitality and the Midwest until I was living in Maine.

After my dad died in early 2021, I went back to Maine and back to work. It was a tough time to be in mourning in Maine, where a loose lockdown would be in effect until June and life was anything but normal.

We were all still working from home, and I tried to lock into some kind of routine. Up, walk the dog, work, walk the dog, work, walk the dog, work, gym, walk the dog, make some semblance of a dinner, and then, being honest, crawl into a bourbon bottle. Rinse, repeat.

Other than South Dakota, Maine is my favorite place I have lived, and it has much to recommend. Fall in New England is like the Grand Canyon — it’s exactly as amazing as people say. Summer is glorious. Winter is grand if you don’t mind huge deposits of snow regularly, and frequent power outages. Turns out, I don’t.

But spring in New England can be an interminable slog — gray and gray and gray and rainy and muddy and gray again. Maine, in particular, is so far east it should be in another time zone. But no one wants to mess with that to go to Logan Airport in Boston, so Mainers mush through.

Some mornings, the sky won’t turn a light gray until 9:30. Some afternoons, darkness would creep in before 4 p.m.

Thus was the backdrop on which I mourned my father — endless gray pandemic days where I saw no one except my redbone coonhound and tipsy nights where I tried to let the pain out a little at a time while I fell into YouTube holes of music he first played me on vinyl.

I made the stupid mistake, early that summer, of volunteering to work Father’s Day. Work would keep me busy, I reasoned, and it’s not like that was a special day for me and my dad anyway.

And so I spent that day — glorious sunshine outside — in front of my work computer, set up on the kitchen table, reading endless tributes on social media from friends and strangers to their dads. And periodically weeping uncontrollably.

I told that story to a dear friend a few weeks later, and they gave me the best advice I have ever heard regarding grief.

Grief comes when it comes. It doesn’t scale logarithmically and sometimes it feels like waves crashing over the entire ship. You cannot manage it beforehand. You can’t plan for it.

But you can be a good host. When the waves of grief come, you have to invite them in and sit with them. It can be for a polite amount of time. It can be until they leave. But you have to invite grief in and sit with it. Offer it food and drink. Make polite conversation with it. You simply have to sit with it until the day comes when it knocks on your door, and you’re glad to see it. That’s the only way.

***
Of course, hospitality has also been front of mind because our little town once again hosted another Summer Arts Festival, and for one weekend in the sleepy summer we were bursting at the seams.

It was the usual muggy weekend for it, and I only got to swing down briefly, but Pioneer Park looked great and the city did a nice job on the bugs — I listened to the sprayers go by several nights.

I spent more than my share of time as an actual host for Arts Festivals past, manning the counter at the BISA booth on the food row, taking money for elephant ears and trying to avoid the blast heat of the sun in front of the booth or deep fryer in the back.

My stepdad and mom owned the Zesto when I was growing up — the old Zesto, across from the pool — and I also spent quite a few summers making malts and cones for the hordes there.

It was always the hottest weekend of the summer, or so it seemed, and a couple years I remember us having lines clear down to the water tower — the one they recently tore down. I do not remember anything in the way of sunscreen or water back then, and I remember the customers seeming to bake along all the concrete of Sixth Street. I remember selling out of soft serve one particularly busy year, and my poor stepfather Rich having to drive a truck down to Omaha to haul more back for Sunday.

It was always a long, chaotic weekend, but I remember, even as a kid, the pride we all felt in taking care of all the people who came to town for the weekend. And I remember being glad we had fans in the back.

Our nation, too, has been playing World Cup host this summer. I am far from a soccer aficionado, but even I got sucked into the action on the pitch, where our men’s national team continued to baffle casual fans by playing like world beaters for stretches and then laying the runniest of eggs in a round of 16 loss to Belgium.

Coincidentally, the last time I really got into international soccer for a fortnight, I was living in West Palm Beach, Florida, and my local was an Irish pub — shouts to O’Sheas if they’re still doing it — where they served a full Irish breakfast and shots when the U.S. scored. It was 2014 and the place was an absolute madhouse for the American games.

Despite being placed in the Group of Death, a win over Ghana, a draw vs Portugal and a tight-fought 1-0 loss to eventual champion Germany sent the U.S. into the round of 16, where we packed in to witness… A loss to Belgium.

But my favorite stories from this World Cup were far from the field. 48 teams qualified for this version, meaning national teams were spread all across the United States — as well as co-hosts Mexico and Canada — and not just sent to New York, Miami and Los Angeles.

This led to some of the most heartwarming snippets I have seen in a long time.

The team from Algeria, for instance, had two group stage matches scheduled in Kansas City, with a road trip to San Francisco thrown in. So they chose Lawrence, Kansas, as their home base.

If you’ve ever had to explain to someone that Midwest Nice isn’t always a backhanded way of saying passive aggressive, you can now point to the residents of Lawrence and how they welcomed the Algerians.

The midwestern college town immediately adopted the Desert Foxes, who were greeted with parades, Algerian flags in storefronts, full houses at their training sessions and the University of Kansas Jayhawk marching band playing their national anthem.

It was an unlikely summer love affair, I guess, if you’re not familiar with hospitality in this part of the world.
The Algerian fans who made the trip to the U.S. unveiled two 20-foot banners at the Algeria-Argentina match in Kansas City. They read simply, “Thank you, Lawrence.”

Not to be outdone, my old neighbors in Boston held the world’s greatest cousin sleepover, as they hosted the team from Scotland for a pair of games.

The Tartan Army were immediately at home there, drinking some bars completely out of Sam Adams and playing the bagpipes for our nation’s most Irish city.

My favorite part, though, was perhaps the most Irish tribute of all.

After Scotland had left Boston, England was scheduled for a match there. The Dubliner, one of the city’s largest Irish pubs, closed the day England was playing. After all, the sign on the door said, nothing important was happening that day.

Let the Three Lions fans buy overpriced, warm beer at the stadium. No Scotland, no party.
I may never understand soccer, but I understand Irish pubs in my bones.

***
What I am trying to say is this: Maybe we need a reminder that our sense of hospitality was borne, collectively, out of hard times.

I remember my father teaching me that if you’re driving out in the country, especially in the winter, and you see a car by the side of the road, or, worse, in the ditch, you stop. See if you can help, or at least make sure they have help coming.

And that’s an easy one to understand. We do that because it could be a long time before the next car comes by. Because we would sure like the help if it was us in the ditch. Because it’s the right thing to do.

We bring hot dishes when someone dies because we know some days grief might visit at dinner time — and because we know, deep down, that nothing we do can help, but we want to do something, and you have to eat.

We cut the grass and fog for bugs and put up with the traffic once a year because we’re proud of our little town and our park and our local artists.

The times surely seem hard. They could always be harder, but they sure seem hard.

That’s all the more reason, then, to try to be of service, where and when we can. Whatever comes, we can be good hosts — to anyone who needs it.

Except the English soccer team.

They’re on their own.

Linehan is the Beacon’s managing editor and welcomes comments at BrookingsBeacon@gmail.com