Greetings, and happy back-to-school season to all of our members who celebrate. As someone who doesn’t have kids, I usually notice this season has begun later than parents do. Often when I am in traffic, find that I’m behind a school bus, and realize this is why traffic has been so much worse the past few weeks. It’s a different experience for each of us, I suppose.
And speaking of different experiences (and forced segues), a quick reminder that our Nominating Committee will soon be reaching out to members to see who might be interested in being an officer next year in CPNO. If you are interested in spending your precious volunteer time in such a capacity, we’ll be announcing at our August regular meeting which officers are interested in returning in 2027 (pending Nominating Committee approval) and which spots are vacant for next year. Ping us at board@candlerpark.org if you’d like to be considered.
Another quick reminder about August and September regular meetings: they’ll both be remote via Zoom. I know that some of you prefer to participate in person, and the Board does its best to make that happen every month. That being said, it’s a fair amount of setup work, and since I’m often splitting that with just one or two other Board members, my absence for a few weeks would put a much heavier load on them. Given the aforementioned “back-to-school season,” we figured this would be easier on our volunteers. We appreciate your understanding. And don’t worry, we’ll be back to both in-person and virtual meeting options upon my return in
October.
To close out today’s brief missive, let me share with you a favorite travel story of mine where Candler Park makes an unexpected appearance. Years ago, through a series of interesting and not necessarily wise decisions on my part, I ended up in a bar in Shanghai waiting on a colleague. Given that he was the one who spoke Mandarin, I used the internationally recognized hand gestures for “I desperately need that beer right there—no, not that one, that one. The one on draft” to convey to the bartender that I wished to be a paying customer. He seemed amused. Or at least not angry.
After that, I sat down to do some work on my laptop, bask in the success of my beer acquisition, and wait on my buddy. As I looked around the place, I saw another ex-pat guy working on his laptop, which was adorned with a number of colorful stickers. As I started trying to piece together who he might be from the little information that laptop stickers provide, I noticed one of them was from Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q.
It took me a moment to process this, as I am not the kind of person who goes around thinking that when he casually meanders into a bar in China, he’s going to see someone who has a sticker from a restaurant that is a 4-minute walk from his house. I’m sure they exist, but they’re a very specific subreddit. So naturally I had to ask him about it.
He was from Australia, and a few years prior, he and some friends had decided to visit the U.S and embark on a barbecue tour.
“So you started with Atlanta?” I asked. (No offense to Atlanta, but I mean come on.)
“No,” he admitted, “we just had an overnight layover in Atlanta. So we figured there must be some barbecue there. The web said the best was Fox Bros., so that’s where we went. It was really good.”
I bought him a beer by repeating my previously successful wild gesticulations at the bar, talked a bit about his BBQ trip and where he was from, and told him a few things about where I was from as well. He was just as surprised as I was that he’d visited a place that was so close to my home and that I’d noticed it while we were both 7000 miles away from there.
Wherever I travel, I try to bring a something from the places I visit with me afterwards, literally or figuratively. In his case, the small token he brought with him from around the corner in our neighborhood made me smile at how small our world can be.