The Folding Chair on the Corner

On the Fourth of July, at ten-forty in the morning, on the northwest corner of Main and Chestnut in a small brick-and-clapboard town called Excelsior on the western shore of Lake Minnetonka, a seventy-three-year-old retired fourth-grade teacher named Beverly Neuenschwander sits down in a white webbed aluminum folding chair she bought at the Ace Hardware on Water Street in the summer of 1998, opens a small red-white-and-blue umbrella she keeps on the top shelf of the front-hall closet the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, and waves at a parade she has been watching from this exact corner since the summer her son Peter came home from Camp Wapo with poison ivy on both elbows.

Beside her, on a small yellow-and-white striped folding cooler her late husband Doug won at a Rotary raffle in 2003, is a paper napkin with a single strawberry shortcake from the Excelsior Bays booth, half eaten, that she has been meaning to finish for eleven minutes. On the corner of the napkin, in blue Sharpie in a young woman's careful bubble-lettering, is the sentence For Bev — with love from the whole crew ♡, written this morning at seven-fifteen by a twenty-six-year-old named Cass who runs the volunteer schedule at the Community Center food shelf, where Beverly has been quietly stocking Wednesday mornings since 2011.

Beverly does not open her purse. She does not check her phone. She waves, in her slow steady schoolteacher's way, at ninety-two floats over the course of forty-seven minutes.

She is, in the plain public unphotographed sense, doing your fall stewardship for you.

What the corner sees

The corner sees everything.

The corner sees the ICA Food Shelf van, driven by a woman named Melodee whose daughter Beverly taught in the fall of 1994, and on whose passenger-side window is taped a small hand-drawn thank-you sign, in a fourth grader's careful capitals, that says YOU FED OUR WHOLE TOWN. Beverly waves at Melodee. Melodee toots the horn twice, softly, in the small way old friends do. The van moves on.

The corner sees the Excelsior-Lake Minnetonka Historical Society float, a wooden farm wagon pulled by a green John Deere, on which four board members Beverly has known for thirty-one years are handing out small paper flags with the phrase EST. 1877 stamped along the pole. The chair of the board, a woman named Ann-Marie in a straw hat, waves at Beverly by name. Ann-Marie wrote Beverly a card in her own hand in November of 2021, on a small ivory notecard with the Society's stone schoolhouse embossed in gray, four months after Doug died, that said, in eleven quiet words, Bev, we are thinking of you and Doug this month.

The corner sees the Minnetonka Center for the Arts, whose pottery instructor took Beverly's granddaughter Elle for six Saturday mornings in the spring of 2024, and whose executive director is walking, in a linen dress, alongside a papier-mâché kiln.

The corner sees Trinity Episcopal — the parish that buried Doug on a rainy Tuesday in July of 2021 — carrying a small hand-lettered sign that reads Come as you are. The young rector, a woman named Elisabeth, sees Beverly on the corner, walks four steps out of formation, and touches Beverly's shoulder without saying anything. Beverly, in the plain steady way, nods once.

The corner sees the Boy Scouts of Troop 349, whose Eagle project in the spring of 2005 was to rebuild the ramp behind Doug's mother's house on Water Street, on which Doug's mother — then eighty-two — was still walking up to the back door with a canvas bag of groceries in October of 2009.

And, in the small quiet unrecorded way, the corner sees who doesn't march.

What isn't in the parade

A large regional charity fifteen miles east — the one that mailed Beverly a four-color capital-campaign brochure in the third week of April, on heavy stock, in a nine-by-twelve envelope with a pre-printed suggested giving level of $500 — Champion — is not in the parade.

They are, in the fair sense, not required to be. Nobody is. The parade is a small ninety-minute local ritual on a Saturday morning in a town most of the country has never heard of, and nobody's fiscal-year giving pyramid is built around it. The regional charity's development director, a perfectly kind woman named Elaine who Beverly has never met, has never been to Excelsior. Elaine will, in the fall, send a follow-up mailing, and then, in November, a personalized note from the CEO, on which the CEO's signature will be printed in blue ink from a small InkJet in a mail house in Eagan, Minnesota, and will, on close inspection, be very slightly pixelated at the loop of the L.

The mailing is a fine mailing. It is not why Beverly is not going to write the check.

Beverly is not going to write the check because on the Fourth of July, at ten-forty in the morning, on the northwest corner of Main and Chestnut, a papier-mâché kiln and a green John Deere and a woman named Elisabeth in a linen dress walked past her folding chair, and a large regional charity fifteen miles east did not.

The audit was public. The audit was free. The audit did not require a wealth screen or a capacity score or a modeled propensity. The audit required somebody from Elaine's shop to spend eight dollars on a strawberry shortcake and stand, in a nine-year-old volunteer T-shirt, at a booth on Water Street. Nobody did.

What the chair is doing

The chair is deciding November.

Not consciously. Beverly is not, at ten-forty on the Fourth, drafting anything. She is watching a parade. She is finishing, slowly, a small square of strawberry shortcake with sweetened cream that is beginning to melt onto the napkin. She is waving at a woman she taught fourth-grade math to in 1988.

But the small warm horizontal light on the corner of Main and Chestnut is doing the work Elaine's brochure will, in four months, try and fail to do. The parade is putting institutions, in the plain living breathing daylight sense, in Beverly's actual field of vision, next to a name, next to a face, next to a wooden float, next to a hand-lettered sign, next to the small warm human fact of a woman she has known for thirty-one years walking four steps out of formation to touch her shoulder without saying anything.

The parade is not a mailing. The parade is a presence. The presence is not billable. The presence is not reportable. The presence is not, in any pretendable sense, something you can A/B test against a control group in a January dashboard.

The presence is the whole game.

A small honest note about Rōmy

Rōmy does not sit in the folding chair.

Rōmy does not walk in the parade. Rōmy does not, in any of the futures we can honestly imagine, get to be the woman in a straw hat waving at Beverly by name, or the young rector in a linen dress touching a shoulder in silence. That work is not, in the plainest sense, work a piece of software gets to do. It is the work of small local institutions on Saturday mornings in July, at ten-forty, at a curb, in front of a folding chair.

What Rōmy can do — quietly, on a Thursday morning in early June, four weeks before the parade — is put in front of the development director of Elaine's regional charity a small honest list of towns whose Fourth of July parades her institution has, in the plain field sense, never been in. The list will not be long. There will be nine towns in her file, in the counties within a two-hour radius, where forty-eight donors on the current major-gifts prospect list live, and in whose local newspapers the parade lineup will be printed on June twenty-ninth. On the list, next to Excelsior, will be one quiet true sentence: Beverly Neuenschwander (2011 — present, monthly stocking volunteer at ICA) sits every year on the northwest corner of Main and Chestnut with a folding chair and a small red-white-and-blue umbrella.

What the director does with the sentence is the small careful dignified work of the development office. She does not, we hope, send a marching band. She sends, we hope, one person — a program officer, an executive-level intern, a board member, anyone — with a T-shirt and a paper flag and a strawberry shortcake, to walk in the parade behind the ICA float, on the small quiet undramatic understanding that being there on the Fourth of July is worth more than being there on the front of a nine-by-twelve envelope in April.

That is, in the end, the whole work.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This week, before the parade season ends, do one small unfashionable thing.

Open the address fields in your CRM. Look for donors clustered in five small towns within two hours of your institution — the kind of town with a Main Street, a public library, a Fourth of July parade, and a booth at the parade selling strawberry shortcake for eight dollars a slice.

Pull the list. It will be shorter than you think. Sixteen towns, maybe eighteen. In each town, pick one street corner. Pick one small local institution — the library, the historical society, the food shelf, the volunteer fire department. Pick one date on the calendar in July, or August, or the second Saturday of September, when the parade goes down Main Street.

Now put your executive director, your program officer, your two most enthusiastic board members, and a small stack of paper flags on the sidewalk at ten-forty in the morning, in a nine-year-old volunteer T-shirt, four steps out of formation. Do not carry a case for support. Do not carry a QR code. Do not carry a brochure. Carry, if anything, a small handwritten note in blue ink on plain cream paper, addressed by first name, that says nothing at all except that you saw a woman with a folding chair on the corner and you wanted to say hello.

Somewhere on Main Street in the small brick-and-clapboard town, a seventy-three-year-old retired fourth-grade teacher is sitting in a white folding chair with a small paper napkin on her cooler and the word love ♡ written in blue Sharpie by a twenty-six-year-old girl she has been quietly stocking Wednesday mornings for.

She is waving at the parade.

Be in the parade.

Be one of the floats. ♡