The Colonel, The Captain and The Rabbi
A weekly mens' breakfast club in Maine
Here where I live in rural Maine, you need to embrace the quiet life. The place is astonishingly beautiful in all four seasons, but if you desire an active social calendar with regular samplings of blinis and the ballet, you are living two hundred miles away from the nearest big city (Boston), and thus in the wrong place at the wrong time of your life. I like the quiet, but every Monday morning my social calendar comes alive with an event that greatly appeals to me.
Twenty men in the summer, a dozen the rest of the year, gather for breakfast each Monday morning in a nearby events space, a barn designed for people. There we each pay for eggs and various side dishes. If we're lucky, the weekend just before involved a lavish catered event and our host ,who runs the catering company, gives us lobster and crabmeat salad, or top-notch whitefish along with our eggs. If we're less fortunate, there are only waffles, bacon and sausages. While I know of few things finer in life than a breakfast with smoked fish, the real draw of these Monday mornings is the conversation.
Some, perhaps many people are convinced that men cannot carry on a conversation because they don't know how to listen; and when it's their turn to speak, they often have nothing interesting to say. While that may be true if you look at large amounts of gender-coded data about the art of conversation, it bears no relation to our Monday breakfasts. This Breakfast Group (the "Group") derives its conversational vitality from the wide variety of people who turn up. There's a mystery writer, a broadcast journalist, a professor of medicine, a retired high school principal, a wine merchant, a film producer, a Texas rancher, several retired Wall Street guys, a biographer/non-fiction writer, a retired Air Force Colonel, a former middle school English teacher.....and another ten guys whose lives have brought them to a place where they are excellent company at breakfast. Many, but not all in the Group are retired, though I think that is not much of factor in explaining why these Monday mornings are so entertaining.
The misandrists (people who hate men) will say that when a man describes an event as entertaining, what he really means is that many dirty jokes were shared. Every once in a while a Group member will share such a joke, but given the advanced age of most members, such jokes are infrequent. Complaints about politics and politicians are also rare, which is fine with me, as most of the Group seem to be Democrats, and I don't generally have the energy or will, early in the day, to argue with Democrats.
The British writer, Catherine Blyth, in The Art of Conversation writes that "Attention x Interest=Conversation=Joy. Her "Concise Manifesto"describes the essential elements of quality conversations in this chart:
What Conversation Isn’t: performance art; competition; scripted.
What It Is mutual appreciation; cooperation; spontaneous
Three Principles: generosity; openness; clarity
The Group was started about fifteen years ago by The Colonel (Air Force), the Captain (of Industry---a retired CEO of two Fortune 200 companies), and the Rabbi (now a local wine merchant). The Rabbi is a curious nickname for someone who, in his salad days, was a potter in Scotland for thirteen years. He's an unusually empathetic guy, an exceptional listener and a top-notch storyteller, which I think is more or less a good job description for a rabbi. (Our Rabbi also knows some Hebrew). At any rate, these founders agreed that each time they met, one of them would invite another guy to breakfast, and if he was acceptable to the other two, he would be invited to join the Group. During Covid, there were no breakfast meetings at the barn, but the Rabbi made available the garden behind his wine shop for BYO lunches. As I am a patron of the Rabbi's wines, he invited me to join these al fresco events.
Membership in the Group is limited to twenty-five people, as it takes a while for the cooking of eggs-to-order, and you do want everyone to be seated at about the same time. But it would be wrong to see the Group as an exclusive club. This is not the Augusta National Golf Club, the Bohemian Club, or the New York Racquet Club. Those clubs vet, winnow, re-vet and re-appraise applicants with microscopic intensity, and admit practically no Jews. In contrast, Jews make up twenty-five percent of the Group's membership according to The Rabbi, which is saying something, as there are only thirty-seven Jewish men in the entire state of Maine. If you lived in our part of Maine, either as a summer resident or year-round, and met the Colonel, the Captain and the Rabbi early in the game, before they found their twenty-five, and they liked you, you'd be in the Group. No reference letters or initiation fee required. Breakfast is $25 and there's a mandatory annual fee for Christmas money for the folks who serve us.
Last Monday at our table, we started things off with a discussion about pine coffins, the ones that for Jewish funerals comes with holes drilled in the bottom to accelerate disintegration of the flesh. The Captain, who is not Jewish, and is only in his mid-to-late-seventies, wants a pine box, and he's told his doctor to note he wants a Jewish funeral. A local not-for-profit that many in the Group support runs wood-building programs, so the Captain's suggestion was that they expand their offerings to include pine coffin construction.
"So, Captain, if you build your own pine box, what will happen to your psyche once you've finished? Will you just take your coffin to your garage and store it next to your gun safe? Or, will you be overcome by angst that Your End is Near?" Various other coffin options were then discussed, and it was unanimously agreed that funeral directors not be allowed to join the Group. The Rabbi changed the topic and asked the table whether any of us (men between 70 and 80) had ever been with a prostitute? The Rabbi then told us his story that as a seventeen-year-old college student in West Virginia, he visited a prostitute in Wheeling. Initially, the madam would not admit him, as he had no draft card showing he was eighteen. He returned later, was allowed in, though he described the experience as, "doing pushups over a man-hole cover." Some would find this objectionable table talk. We did not; it was too amusingly told, and so we peppered The Rabbi with a series of follow-up questions, including how did this Jewish kid from Queens end up in the early 1960s at a Disciples of Christ college in West Virginia?
This Monday, the Captain brought his brother-in-law, an active-duty Army Colonel who told us how our military aircraft can detect the gases that are coming out of a chimney in a warehouse located in a hostile country in the Middle East. Those gases reveal signatures that can be read to pinpoint the precise type of bomb that's being made there. Unfortunately, we learned, that factory cannot be destroyed until Defense Department lawyers back in Washington determine how many civilians might be harmed by a strike. The U.S. and Britain, he told us, are the only two nations in the world this scrupulous about avoiding collateral damage.
One of the best Group conversations this summer involved a description of the Surgeons' Hall Museum in Edinburgh which, since 1832, has offered its riveting collection of historic cutting tools, "anesthetics," and preserved items of anatomy. As our storyteller put it, "one of the two or three most fascinating museum experiences I've ever had." Another recent favorite story came from our Texas rancher who explained to this guy from New York City (me), what 'buck fever" is all about. At his quail-and-deer hunting ranch, there's a motion-detection camera monitoring the various watering-holes around the ranch. If the ranch manager sees video of a particularly large deer drinking water, he immediately texts several of the ranch's best clients, such as this guy who's a senior partner in a Houston law firm. We'll call him Buck. Buck receives the text at around 8 AM, immediately cancels his meetings for the day, and flies down to the ranch, arriving by about eleven. Within an hour, Buck has killed this deer and is on his way back to the office. But not before he's been presented with a bill for $11,000, as the price depends on certain measurements of the deer's size and antler configuration. Buck shot a very expensive deer. I suppose this is just a different form of impulse shopping, Texas-style. For sheer excitement, there was that morning a month ago when The Colonel told us about flying an Air Force fighter jet in Vietnam. He needed at times to fly at an altitude of only five hundred feet to accurately deliver the ordnance. Luckily, the Viet Cong weren't that skilled in anti-aircraft defense.
With conversations about building your own coffin, antique scalpels, deer hunting and fighter jets, you might imagine the Group specializes in talk about violence and death. Not so. Quite a few members have collections of boats and cars, many in the deluxe category. Some have collections of both. Some have personal airplanes, though not necessarily Gulfstreams. Conversations about these machines can generate friction, as some Group members find talk about machinery unacceptably tedious, not just at breakfast, but at any time. I share their lack of interest, but as most of these conversations report on how and why these machines are malfunctioning and ruining the peace of mind of their owners, I'm prepared to listen patiently. A dose of Schadenfreude can be an excellent way to start your week.
The Group is special to me, and I suspect to most other members, because there are no narcissists present to hog the conversation and tell us how successful they've been in life. The Rabbi tells me that several members are worth well over $100 million, but you'd not know this from breakfast with them. Our Treasurer for instance, a man of means, is responsible for collecting the $25 from each attendee at his table, and then delivering the haul to The Colonel. This requires him to gather that sum from at most seven other men. This counting-to-200 has regularly devolved into a short comedy skit, especially if change needs to be given for a $50 bill.
The men sitting around these tables, without exception, are excellent listeners, with open minds and quick wits. Now, if you say something foolish, because we're listening carefully, we’ll react to your foolishness, but with a velvet hammer. These breakfasts last about ninety minutes, and I've not been to one where I didn't have a big laugh at several moments.
To start your week laughing and making others laugh is as good as it gets at our age. With that kind of entertainment, who needs Boston? As Charlie Chaplin put it, "a day without laughter is a day wasted." Lord Byron said, "always laugh when you can; it is cheap medicine."
I'll leave the last line to Shakespeare: "With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come."