What did an online search for "Bryn Athyn Friday Supper" turn up? My irrational hope for a range of pictures from over the years, a totally unrealistic entry in Wikipedia, something, anything. But - nothing.
Which gets me wondering about what remarkable moments in my right-now life I might miss in the future, that made an unforgettable impression but will be basically forgotten. Even by me.
I don't have the opportunity to forget Friday Supper. An older friend reminds me of it every time we go out in the evening.
"What's happening in Burn Athyn?" she invariably asks, always affectionately tweaking the first word, always asked with a smile. And I have to tell her that nothing is happening back in her little hometown.
After five years of asking the same question & getting the same answer, it still doesn't compute that all the adults in the town don't flock to the Assembly Hall for a weekly community supper, that the endless round of weddings that featured open invitations to both the ceremony & general reception in the Choir Hall are now almost always invitation-only, that once-free concerts now require a ticket (still a bargain), that the school dances dotted throughout the years no longer feature music older people would enjoy, that springtime's Glencairn Dance is a lovely memory in increasingly fewer minds.
All things considered, I think my friend does very well, when you think about how she assumed life would be, even for someone in her nineties. Especially how well she takes the loss of Friday Supper.
It is because of Anne that I appreciate how other older friends in our little hometown also had unconscious expectations of very different "senior" years.
While I experienced the under-appreciated wonders for Friday Supper from my middish-teens to my early thirties, she & so many others went for all their lives, many - like Anne - into their seventies. As high school teens, they saw the older men & women who filled the front tables & would naturally assume that someday those older folks would be them.
Smiling again, remembering Friday Supper social etiquette.
The oldest people - arriving on their own or with family, friends - at the front, then increasingly younger the further you went toward the back. There were always a lot of young people. High school & college dorm kids were always there, because "Bean Hall" closed on Friday nights - and where you found dorm gals & guys, you'd find more from the "Settlement"! Holding that image in my heart - the Assembly Hall playing court (the basketball hoops drawn up against backboards) filled to capacity with friends & pleasant acquaintances, all gabbing as they reached for the yummy food, made by revolving groups of community women & a few men (shout out to Dave Roscoe & John Acton!) served family style by revolving squads of high school seniors (or were they juniors?).
That happened Friday after Friday throughout the school year. The Club Supper, down at the C&S on Saturdays took its place over the summer - not as many people went to that, due to the bar down in the club & the steps that made it difficult for wobbly olders to get upstairs to the supper room.
It is impossible to imagine how Friday Supper helped give Bryn Athyn a special cohesiveness, on more levels than I first imagined. It's not just that all ages ate together at least once a week, or that for elders got to wave across the room or say HI! to adult children grandchildren nieces nephews, or visiting around your table. Every Friday night, men came home from work, showered, put on a sharp looking suit & tie, and take their even more spiffy-looking wife OUT to supper with other adult friends.
My own parents treated Friday Supper as date night. My guess is that countless others through the years did, too. I know that Anne & Kent did - going to Friday Supper spanned their courtship to their retirement.
When Anne remembers Friday Supper, she doesn't just remember going with Kent, as middle aged or getting-up-there adults. What she mostly talks about are her high school & college years, when she went with Bill, a friend who would die in World War II, with her friends & family, including her only brother, who also died in the war, of going there with Kent, as friends & later as something more & finally as husband & wife. When she talks about Friday Supper, she is eighteen & twenty-two, not over ninety.
Did an online search for "Bryn Athyn Friday Supper" & came up with zip. But look into my heart, look into Anne's, look into the hearts of so many men & women I'll see in just a couple hours at church - look there & what unforgettable pictures & stories you'd find!
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