The Detour

Inside the meeting that secured two million dollars for a community grocery cooperative, my phone would not stop ringing

The morning I became a board member of a grocery cooperative that just secured two million dollars, my laptop rang in the middle of the meeting.

2 million secured/Photo by Daily Gazette

Not once, but several times. The same number, insistent, almost rude in its persistence, filling a room where I was supposed to be impressive with a sound I could not immediately silence. I stared at my screen, at the spreadsheet I had stayed up preparing, at the finance questions I had written out so I would sound like I belonged there, and I dismissed the call with untraceable mortification because I am absolutely someone who knows better.

I dismissed it again and again, until I finally figured out how to make the laptop stay quiet, while sitting there pretending that had not happened.

After the meeting, during the tour, we got the news. Two million dollars secured for the coop. A site tour for NYS Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, the man with deep pockets and a presence that makes a room recalibrate, hosted alongside Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara, who is himself a member of our coop.

I walked out of the building where the grocery store will exist soon and into the June air in an utter daze. My body was still catching up to what my mind just experienced and witnessed.

My phone rang, while I was walking and trying to remember where I parked. I recognized the last four digits immediately. The recognition of something that had already embarrassed me once today.

I answered.

It was Richard. Co-owner of Moon and River Cafe in the Stockade. He had gotten my number from the younger brother of the other co-owner, who I had met the night before entirely by accident, in the way that many meaningful things happen to me. It was by way of a detour.

Andrew’s bike got a flat on our evening ride. He took my electric assist bike home to get the car, which meant I had a window, which was unhurried and unplanned, to finally walk into the cafe I had been meaning to visit for months. Moon and River smells like the living room of someone’s grandmother, where the house sat still for a decade and then a group of younger people, thirties, forties, creative and unbothered, walked through the door and said this is perfect, mustiness and all. They kept everything the same and added espresso and intention.

I started talking to a young man behind the counter. Turns out he was the son of the owners of my hair salon. The odds of that sentence existing are slim enough to make you pause and pay attention, which I did. I am always paying attention.

He passed my name on to Richard/ Photo by Author

That brief conversation, twenty minutes at most, was the connection that pulled everything in forward motion. Richard called me the next morning, during my first board finance meeting, while my spreadsheet was open and my questions were prepared and I was trying very hard to be the Treasurer I had just been elected to be.

He was kind. He was also not taking no for an answer, which felt less like pressure and a lot like the Universe using someone else’s voice to say what it needed to say directly to me.

I said yes to July 12th. I said yes to July 26th.

There is a version of that Tuesday night where Andrew’s bike doesn’t go flat. Where we ride home together, satisfied after finally trying Slick’s, full from a late dinner and a World Cup game that kept us past closing. Where I go straight home and Moon and River remains a place I keep meaning to visit.

That version doesn’t have Richard’s number in it. Doesn’t have the call I recognized from an in-person finance meeting. Doesn’t have two performance dates in July at a cafe that smells like someone’s grandmother decided to let the creatives in.

The flat tire was the entry point.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be early to your own life, to arrive before the world has caught up to the fact that you belong there. The board seat, I was literally handed. My essay in a globally distributed book. My poetry gathering launching this week on Wednesday. The whispers of a September art night being built around my voice specifically.

None of it was planned this way. All of it required me to stay in the moment instead of going straight home.

I am learning to love the detour. It keeps taking me exactly where I need to be.

Embracing the Detours/ Photo by Author