New England Style

This past weekend, since there were no events on the Grand Chapter calendar, I was able to attend the wedding of my cousin which was held in Connecticut.  A long time ago I lived in Massachussetts and my father was actually raised a Mason there and had his Shrine membership there as well, all the years until he passed away, but I haven't been back to any New England state in the past twenty years or so.  Mostly, I remember how there are two or three nice weeks in the spring and two or three nice weeks in the fall and the rest of the time the weather is unpleasant for one reason or another, especially to California weather wimps like me.

Yes, there was a time when I would stride happily down the snow lined sidewalks in a T-shirt and jeans, but those days are gone and not coming back.  Now I want the weather to be higher than 60 and less than 85 at all times, with rain only while I am indoors and don't have to be out in it, preferably from midnight to 6:00 am so that it has dried out by the time I go outside, and snow is something that I love to see on the mountain tops because it makes them so pretty from a distance.  I like the relative humidity to be high enough that I don't feel dried out but low enough that I don't feel like I just stepped into the bathroom after someone took a hot shower for thirty minutes without the window open or the ceiling fan going.  Okay, I know how to handle weather outside of those conditions, but I also know how to handle snakebites and poison oak - that doesn't mean I want to have to deal with those things, okay?  So most of the time weather in the San Francisco Bay Area stays within parameters and most of the time in New England, the weather is outside of parameters.  I did get lucky, I am told however, because it didn't rain until the day I was leaving and it lulled long enough for me to get in and out of the rental car and into the airport, so four days and no rain I had to be out in.  Yay!

As long as I was out there visiting, I made arrangements to visit with my counterpart, the lady who will be serving as Worthy Grand Matron in Connecticut when I am serving in California.  That was totally cool.  It was a lot of fun to learn how they do things differently there and of course, some of why they can.  To begin with, the whole state is only about two hours from corner to corner, so by California measures, every event is local.  They have only thirty Chapters, so they can make an Official Visit to each one and usually those visits are during the week on the Chapters regular meeting night, with a couple of exceptions for Chapters that meet in places where the parking would be difficult.  The entire Grand Family makes all the visits, possible because everything is local, and they seldom if ever need to stay in a hotel room.  That part sounded pretty cool.

However, the less cool part was that at these visits, the Chapter does the entire Initiation ceremony and demonstrates balloting procedures on top of Opening, Closing and regular Chapter business, plus the WGM has to review the books and records of the Chapter, so these visits can take three hours or more and all on a work night, so those who work have to drive an hour home and then go to work the next morning.  They try not to schedule these things on consecutive days, but that length of visit would tire me out completely.  But I understand why they do it.  They don't have districts and deputies there, so the Worthy Grand Matron has to do herself all the inspecting and viewing that we have our Deputies perform.  Yay for Deputies!!!

Another thing I found interesting there was that they introduce their legislation at their Grand Chapter session and it then lies over for a whole year before being voted on at the following year's session.  Then, after the session when it was introduced, the WGM has three informational meetings to discuss the items and the reasoning behind them.  Of course that is more practical when anyone in the state can probably get to all three meetings, so they can pick based on schedule.  We have trouble covering the whole state in ten to twelve Transitionals or Instructionals and even then we can't get to everywhere.

I also found out that the Grand Line officers have a New England Association where the six states, and a couple of Candian provinces also, get together at intervals to discuss problems and issues and plans, just as we do in some areas of the state.  They get to visit each other's sessions and share ideas.  That would be nice, but not practical when the entire six state area would fit in California with land leftover.  Still it was interesting to hear about.

All in all, visiting with my counterpart was totally awesome and it really gives a person a great opportunity to see how differerently our governing documents can be interpreted and implemented.  They started from the same place, but ended up somewhere totally different and maybe we need to remember sometimes that different does not equal bad.

Next weekend, I will be in Fresno for lots of stuff.