Strider Alone in His Corner

Yesterday, as I watched what I consider the best series currently on television, which is Rick Steves’s travelogues about Europe, I began reflecting on the way he always seems to get into a pub or some other situation in which Europeans come together and celebrate, whether there’s anything specific to use as an excuse or not.  It might be a men’s choir in Wales, a traditional pub in Dublin or a beer garden in Bavaria.  But everyone is a part of the group, there is music and there is beer.  Joy is passed around to locals and visitors alike.

Then this morning I received a Carl Sandburg poem from my daughter in California.  It reads as follows:

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to the famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them.
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines River
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and    children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

Why is this country so different when there are no unassimilated Hungarians in the vicinity?  Oh, I can name a couple of venues, mainly in places such as Austin, Texas, where I’ve been in such celebrations, even on a Monday evening, but they have been few and far between.  At the end of the first meeting of a nationally-based summer seminar in Austin, one of the participants announced that we were going to get together at the Texas Tavern that evening.  The Texas Tavern is located in the University of Texas student union, and on that particular evening Brazilian jazz was playing.  Everyone who wandered in formed part of a big, gregarious group.  I was emphatically not a dancer, but a lady the seminar director later called “a Cuban ballerina” dragged me up onto the stage and forced me to improvise.  I was tripping what was definitely not light, but it was fantastic, and no one laughed.  They were all laughing about other things, rocking to the rhythm and drinking beer poured out of pitchers.

Perhaps the best one of those that I’ve been in was in the small city of San Ramón, Costa Rica.  On a Saturday evening some friends and I walked over to a nice little club where North American pop music of the fifties and sixties was playing.  Everyone who wasn’t dancing was sitting at little tables and drinking (like Dave Barry, I am not making this up) rum and Sprite.  No one was drunk.  The one teenager who showed up at the door a little sloshed was gently advised by the portly cop to go home and sleep it off, and he left without an argument.

The most impressive thing to me was that everyone there was part of a celebrating family.  Teenagers were dancing with people in their sixties, and one of those voluptuous Costa Rican beauties (who are supposed to be the most beautiful in all of Latin America) came and asked me to dance.

Are we beyond that or have we not yet attained the level of civilization where we can feel comfortable with it?  Why can’t we have neighborhood bars where we can take the kids and join in singing to the accompaniment of some guys with simple instruments, enjoying the company of old friends and new ones alike?  Perhaps we’re so advanced in technology, medicine and a few other areas that we hypocritically believe we’re better off sitting in sports bars with two or three friends and shouting once in a while when our team makes a good play.  Or maybe it’s just that we’ve never had a war spill over into our country and force us to gain some solidarity.  God forbid that it should take that to turn us into a real society.  Remember that Mother Teresa, on a visit here, commented that this is the most poverty-stricken country in the world because we don’t know how to do community?