Not Funny
My father’s philosophy was to invoke humor in the face of disaster. On the worst occasions he’d come up with a comment meant to elicit at the very least, a smile, despite its inappropriateness. Myself in the midst of kidding and lambing season, which is akin to Mother’s Day for a florist and tax season for a CPA, I hadn’t really been paying too much attention to the news. Social media kept circulating images and memes of the Ukrainian president so when Sunday rolled around I cracked a joke about it, but my Ukrainian friend didn’t laugh and I instantly realized how badly I’d behaved by the look on their face. Sorry Dad, in this situation your way of dealing with a horrific situation wasn’t the solution.
Equally bad was the terse email I shot off earlier in the week to a Ukrainian customer who failed to show up the previous week for a standing order of perishables. How dare they inconvenience me. Now I felt like a heel.
The world is a big place geographically, but as we’ve learned in the last few years with the COVID-19 what happens on the other side of the globe can severely impact everyone on the planet. Pandemics, politics, climate change, energy, and food security are all at the forefront of the issues affecting humanity as a whole. Suddenly the world doesn’t seem so big anymore. Spend enough time at the farmers market and it will seem downright small. True story: one of my customers is a Ugandan refugee who was resettled near my hometown and graduated from the same high school I did.
After my terrible faux pas on Sunday morning the Universe had to drive the lesson home as both my Ukrainian and Russian customers’ eyes welled with tears each time I asked them how they were doing. They shared family updates via images and history lessons in an attempt to explain what was happening to their homelands. “Now you know why we live here,” one added and that was what broke me. I’ve never had to leave home the way they have. Many Europeans were also upset along with anyone else who had a conscience. There was more egg on my face than in my cartons.
On the way home I listened to NPR instead of my audiobook. At the end of my day I opened news apps instead of social media. I saw what was happening in the world and was ashamed of my ignorance at events that are impacting my friends, my customers.
In the twenty years of attending farmers markets in the MD/DC area I’ve had the privilege of serving customers from over 60 different countries (that I know of) --people from all walks of life. Given that food is an integral part of holidays and festivals, I’ve become enamored with learning to celebrate the various traditions practiced by the people I see week after week, year after year.
I get to share in the joy when I provide the ingredients for festive meals, but there is more to life than happiness and good times. No, there comes a time when one must also acknowledge grief, disappointment, injustice, and hardship meeting the challenges with empathy.