Living in the Real World

The phone rings.  The bank is on the line.  Payroll needs to be uploaded by 10 AM.  One of the pie-baking ovens is on the blink, and we need to get a new motor for the water pump and someone needs about 20 pages of information for another workers compensation quote.  We hear on the intercom that someone can’t order Sleepy Hollow tickets on line.

I put the phone on “do not disturb” and I look at the village outside my window again.  

Sometimes the peace, and the calm that picture paints is too much for me.  I shouldn’t admit this, but I have to fight back tears just looking at the thing, because some of those people out that window are my own children, grown tall and strong, and quite a few of the rest are my old friends.  The place really is a village, even if it’s a theatrical, prop-driven, costume-decorated imitation of 18th century life — there are real people getting ready to share it every day.

I’m not entirely a romantic.  I know the past was brutal.  I’ve read about the hardships of slavery, disease, bad harvests and trying to keep a wood frame home warm in sub-zero winters.  New England townships suffered actual plagues, with entire families succumbing to death, or worse, some poor farmer being left after that heartache all by himself — having to bury, literally, his entire family.  I can’t even fathom enduring a rotting, aching tooth in the 1770s or the muscle-ache attached to clearing 300 acres of forest–just to plant your crop.  The past isn’t all pretty pictures.

But neither is any age.  As I write this, I consider with half rage and half deep sorrow, the plight of dozens of Coptic Christians who were led to a beach and slaughtered by ISIS.  

The world, in any era, has its share of ugliness, and cruelty, and tyranny.

And that’s why that picture, out the window, comforts me.  It’s a small picture of a victory — one for the little guys.  Picture a band of farmers who had impossibly beautiful ideals — all men are created equal; they should be able to speak their mind; govern themselves, protect their families.

I’ve been at this for 20 years and I don’t get tired of it.  It’s the fire in my belly, the purpose, I think, God made me — to keep telling at least one story of victory.  People sometimes joke that I don’t live in the real world, and that’s probably true.

But shouldn’t a real world mirror, at least a bit, the one you’ve been dreaming about?  Grandma Riley, who loved this place, and who helped make it all happen, has been gone a year now, and she once told me she had a dream that was something like the one I get to see out my window every day.  

I call it the real world.  Thanks for coming up to share it with us.

Categorised in: Bakery, Courage, Dinners, Pictures

This post was written by Jim Riley