Hats and gloves optional

Today the Board of Trustees of my library, along with the Friends organization, held a tea for those who contributed to our 2007-2008 annual fund. The invitations that we sent out said “hats and gloves optional, but wouldn’t it be fun?” and a number of ladies did, indeed, wear hats; some even wore gloves. One lady told me her hat was 50 years old. All of the hats had to have been old, for where on earth can one buy a (formal, not sports) hat these days? Department stores used to have large hat departments, for women and men (one of my first jobs was as assistant buyer in the Men’s Shoes and Hats department of The Hecht Company in Washington, D.C.); but I don’t think they sell hats at all anymore, do they? One woman who attended our tea told me she had bought hers at the local second-hand dress shop, Reappearances, especially for the occasion.

I would have worn a hat, but it’s been a very long time since I owned one. In fact, I think the only time I ever wore a proper hat was as a child, when going to church. (Hah, those were the days, huh? Now people wear their sweat suits to church...)

My contribution to the selection of goodies available was a plate of cucumber sandwiches. I felt that any tea deserving of the name must have cucumber sandwiches, a la The Importance of Being Ernest. Making them was the usual ordeal. Probably because of my compulsion to perfection, preparing a meal when people are coming for dinner is an ordeal, preparing a single contribution for a potluck kind of event is an ordeal. And this particular ordeal began when I sat down at the computer to look for a good cucumber sandwich recipe. Too many choices! One site alone offered 89 possibilities. I ended up using a recipe out of my head – simpler than most of the ones I was reading, less like the cocktail party hors d’oeuvres many of the recipes suggested (on little rye bread rounds, with Italian dressing mixed in and paprika sprinkled on top, for example). My “recipe” consisted of mashing cream cheese and unsalted butter together, mixing a little dill into that – could probably have used more dill, but was afraid of there being too much – with a thinly sliced cucumber on each half sandwich. I removed the crust from the bread I used (naturally!), then sliced the sandwiches in half diagonally, producing little triangles. Each triangle had a cucumber.

After finally deciding how I was going to do the sandwiches, I went to the supermarket to get the ingredients, and had trouble deciding if an 8-oz package would be enough, or should I get the bigger package. After finally settling on 8 ounces (which made 20 of the little half sandwiches, for those with a party coming up), I proceeded to have trouble deciding what kind of white bread to get. Was planning on using the rest of my loaf of Country Kitchen Scotch Oatmeal for the brown sandwiches, but knew I had to have some white ones too, both for color and texture variety, and because some people, yes, even in this enlightened day and age, do not like whole grain bread. After I’d finally decided on Country Kitchen Unseeded Italian – which I probably would not go with again, because the texture was a little too flabby – I couldn’t decide whether I should buy one cucumber or two! Oh, good lord. I bought two, used only one.

And then, when it came time to actually make the sandwiches I found that, as so often happens, I had underestimated how long it would take, and was hyperventilating while frantically smearing cream-cheese-and-butter, knowing that I needed to be leaving in five minutes at the latest, in order to get to the library in time to let the ladies from the Friends in so they could set up.

But I made it in time, the sandwiches were fine, and popular, the tea was actually a very nice event, that everyone seemed to enjoy. A little girl, daughter of two of our patrons (and biggest contributors) played the violin. The child is only ten, but amazingly good; it was not embarrassing having her play. Of course, all the men present, with the exception of the two male Board members who showed up (five female members put in an appearance), had been dragged there by their wives. A tea simply is not a guy thing. In all honesty, I can’t say it’s my kind of thing either, not in the traditional sense. That “sense” involves a bunch of women sitting around talking about boring things like their health, babies, diets, with the talk possibly dipping into gossip of the cattier sort. This tea was nothing like that; talk was much more general; there was a lot of movement among groups. Actually, it was more like a cocktail party, but with the “cocktail” consisting of coffee or tea. And our Board president, who is himself a poet, read several rather charming poems that, in one way or another, had to do with libraries, or at least books. So there you go.