Joining a lunch ritual across generations and idealogies
One afternoon not long after my father passed away one of his longtime friends stopped by my office to invite me to fill my dad’s vacancy at a group called the Friday Noon Football Club. The FNFC’s history stretches back a generation before my dad joined, and my dad was a member for several decades. It is a small, but longstanding institution.
The weekly meetings start as a BYO lunch around a conference table at one member’s law office. The conversation during lunch is exactly what you imagine: discussions about last week’s big plays, thoughts on various teams’ prospects, and a lot of good-natured ribbing. Once lunch is settled, the club moves on to an arcane process of picking spreads on the coming weekend’s games. After a full season, I am still not entirely sure how the picking works, and while my standing at the end of the season reflected that, I am pretty sure that I am not the only one that finds the process a bit opaque. But that is okay: the person who accumulates the most points for the season has, in the past, bought everyone else lunch at the end. To win is to lose (but to lose with bragging rights).
At this point I want to mention that my father was a lifelong and very active member of the Republican party. His father before him was deeply involved in Chester County’s GOP, ultimately being appointed as a federal circuit judge by Eisenhower. During the 1970s my dad campaigned heavily for his brother Larry (who succeeded in becoming a judge) and a slate of other Republican candidates. My dad ended up serving as a GOP precinct co-chair for 25 years.
I mention this because when I was invited to join the FNFC I fully expected that, as one of my dad’s most treasured weekly rituals, it would be a collection of old, conservative businessmen. Well, they are old (and there’s nothing wrong with that, I hope to be old someday too), but the membership spans the full spectrum of political positions.
In the present political climate of hyper-polarization it may seem hard to believe, but these gentlemen have been able to convene over lunch every week and even survive political discussions for decades. All it took was a very basic sense of mutual respect.
Since I started writing these columns, I have heard from several of my dad’s other contemporaries and the feedback can best be summed up by one comment, “He would be proud of you. He would disagree with everything you’re saying, but he would be proud of you.”
I occasionally read the comments and letters that are written in response to the commentary in this paper. It is filled with bitter and divisive language decrying both the supposed liberal and supposed conservative bias of the paper. (The very fact that there are commentators from both sides that evoke responses from both sides should make plain that the paper is doing a pretty good job of staying in the middle.)
This newspaper’s decision to include a few new liberal voices was not made to perturb or alienate the existing readership, but rather to reflect the dramatic shift in the region’s political composition. The “collar counties” around Philadelphia have gone from secure strongholds of the right to purple places capable of electing entire slates of Democrats, all in the span of a few decades.
I view it as a privilege to live in an area that is so reflective of the country as a whole. Being neighbors with those who do not see eye-to-eye with us makes it clear that the other side is populated by real people, not just talking heads, politicians, or trolls all living in faraway places where the people are “different.” Hearing how issues impact different people in their daily lives directly from those people is a humbling reminder that none of us has a monopoly on truth, so we would do well to use some of the mutual respect that has kept the FNFC together all these years.