The Room I Have

Let me tell you about a Saturday.

We tried something new last month, and the next one is already on the calendar. One afternoon a month, from one to three, we open the doors of the lodge for a family game day. Two hours, not a minute longer. Chips, popcorn, bottles of water, bring your own games. There is no agenda and no program. That is the entire plan.

We handed out Pokémon card packs to any kid who wrote his name on a ticket. Parents played with their children or turned them loose to learn a new game with somebody else’s children. The adults who wanted to talk stood in the kitchen with coffee. The kids who wanted to run ran, out in the yard, tossing a disc toward the baskets we put in. Our Eastern Star ladies came. Whole families came. We put a movie on in the back room, the one still full of old donated furniture nobody has the heart to throw out, and there were coloring pages on the table and cards being dealt and chips on the floor and a lot of laughing.

It felt good. We spend months planning bigger things, and this one asked for almost nothing and gave back more than most of them.

It was Brother Tim’s idea. Tim is the kindest man I know, father of two boys, married to a woman who keeps him pointed in the right direction. He owns two businesses that both want all of him, he spends two weeks a month or more on the road, and he started a PTA at his kids’ school. He still makes every meeting. And when he had the notion for a family game day, he did not bring it to the lodge for a vote or wait for permission. He talked it over with a few friends, trusted his gut, and announced it was happening. He put up a Facebook post and the community answered.

I know the version of Masonry we are supposed to miss. Full pews, packed Tuesdays, a hall so crowded for a brother’s funeral that men crossed a river to get there. It is a beautiful story and I have told it myself. But I have stopped letting it stand over my shoulder and grade me. Whatever that room was, it is not the room I have, and the room I have was laughing on a Saturday afternoon.

A lodge was never the building or the calendar or the size of the roll. It was always whoever showed up, and what it felt like when they did. For a long time I thought my job was to get the numbers back. Lately I think the job is simpler. Make the room worth walking into, and stop apologizing that the ones who walk in are fewer than some story says they should be.

I think about those old families on a winter night, no screens pulling them in six directions, walking into a warm hall full of people they knew. Then I look at coloring pages and disc golf and a movie playing on furniture older than anyone watching it, and I cannot find the gap that nostalgia keeps insisting is there.

We are not trying to get back to anything. We set out the chips, we opened the doors, and the people who were here came in.

So thank you, Tim. For being yourself, for trusting yourself, and for starting something that is going to brighten a lot of days for a lot of families this year.

-Brother Rob