Bittersweet Chocolate

This past weekend was the joint reception for the Worthy Grand Matron and Worthy Grand Patron, an event that is usually considered the last big hurrah of an Eastern Star year, leaving only the Grand Chapter session itself to close out 2011.  The Grand Officers were in chocolate brown matching formals in honor of our WGM and WGP.

September and October are interesting sort of blended months for Grand Line Officers.  We are all, of course, still holding our 2011 offices, but next weekend, we will meet our 2012 Grand Family and have a school of instruction on our soon to be new offices that we will hold after Grand Installation next month.  And we will also have a school of instruction for the soon to be 2012 Deputy Grand Matrons, where we will show the work of our next year offices.  But we are still this year's officers!  It feels sort of weird every year at this time.

I call it bittersweet because it is hard to say good bye each year to your family and start learning to be part of a new family.  Even though you didn't choose these Sisters and Brothers, and even though in many years, they don't consider you to "really" be part of "their family" (and boy does this vary WIDELY from year to year!!), you've traveled with them for a year, shared happy times and hardships with them, and gotten to know them and now they are leaving and you are moving on to make new friends with a new group.  I have made special friendships out of each of my years of service so far and have missed those friends each time the year turns.

It is particularly hard for me because I really am very shy around strangers.  No one believes me when I tell them that, but it is true.  It takes me a while to get used to new people and I am terrible with learning names so that takes me a while too.  In fact, it is one of the things that I try to spend serious amounts of time at Grand Officer School doing, learning the names of all the new officers and escorts.  It is also hard because lots more people know my name than I know theirs.  I am great with faces and I can look at a person and know that I know them and I can often remember when I met them and sometimes even where we were or what they were wearing at the time, but the names just don't stick and since it is awkward not to remember people's names, strangers are hard for me.  I work at it every day at every event, to get out there and shake hands and meet strangers, but it is tough.  Maybe that is why I like events with meals, because if I am sitting at a table with people, I have time to get to know them and get their names in my head.

The irony of the idea of the reception as the last hurrah is that the thing that almost everyone remembers the most about a Worthy Grand Matron is how smoothly her session went, even though it is the very last thing we do.  People forget the receptions but the remember the session. If you had a smooth session, they remember you as doing a great job and if you have a rocky session, then not so much.

The joint reception is a "recent" (in Eastern Star terms where you need twenty years to be "not recent") innovation, primarily designed I believe, to save travel for the WMs and WPs and to save money for the Chapters of the WGM and WGP.  It used to be in California, unlike other states, that wives and husbands were discouraged from going to the East in their Chapter together because that way there were two couples to share the time and the work.  When it was that way, the WPs and their spouses could go to the WGP reception and the WMs and their spouses could go to the WGMs reception.  But in recent times, there have been so many couples going to the East together, that separate receptions meant they had to travel twice instead of once.

I did consider trying something new here and having a WGP reception in the South, which the southern WMs and WPs would  attend, and a WGM reception in the North, which the northern WMs and WPs would attend, but once I started looking at the 2013 calendar, I discovered that there weren't two weekends available to use so it would have to be a joint reception because there was only one Saturday open.  Ah well!

Next weekend, I will be in Riverside, finding out who will be in the 2012 Grand Family.