People are always looking for good news, for the heart-warming fluff that appears all too rarely in the media these days. So here’s a dose of joy this week: At this year’s Harvest Fair, we accidentally created the world’s kindest system of restaurant reviews.

Over the last couple of post-pandemic years, we’ve had to remember how to serve a Turkey Dinner to so many people at once, and we’ve been refining the process over time. This year, we filled out an order slip for each diner at the door listing exactly what each person was ordering. Our servers brought them back to the kitchen, where plates could be made up, and then sent back out to the diners. Overall, it worked pretty well!

There was just one unintended hitch. On the order slip, we had fields like “Turkey — White / Dark,” “Sides — don’t give me… Potatoes / Stuffing / Gravy,” and “Pie — No Pie / Pie / Pie a la Mode.” And then, at the bottom, the simply-labeled: “Notes,” with a few blank lines. This was, I suppose, intended for things like “Extra gravy!” and so on, any additional random notes that we wanted to the kitchen from the front.

But when people received their meals, the order slips came back. And so what we received, by way of “Notes,” was not “Extra gravy!” or “Please don’t let the cranberry touch the stuffing.”

It was, in fact, the world’s kindest system of restaurant reviews. What was intended for us to write notes about people’s orders became a way for them to write something back to us. Here’s some of what they said:

• “Nate was an efficient, attentive, and friendly server. Otto was a delightful host—fun and responsible. Turkey—moist, everything yummy! Tx.”
• “Food was delicious, especially the apple pie. Most notably, the service was incredibly attentive. The whole experience was delightful.”
• “What a treat! Thank you so much for the fast and attentive table service. You all did a wonderful job!”
• “Lovely atmosphere with great food and service.”
• “A splendid meal served by an exceptional crew.”
• “5 star service. The food was amazing. You did an awesome job. Keep up the good work. Thank you and God Bless.”
• “Great food thank you!!!” (this was from one of the aforementioned servers, to the kitchen!)
• “Very fast service and food tasted amazing” (okay, this was also from one of the servers…)

Okay, some of these were patting ourselves on the back. (I’m pretty sure one Vestry member wrote “I will come back!”) But for the most part, I didn’t recognize the names. These were the honest and heartfelt thoughts of our neighbors, given the opportunity to say something. I think the only criticism I read, while leafing through, was “I could have used less mashed potatoes on my plate,” to which I can only say—No, dear neighbor; there is no such thing as too many mashed potatoes on your plate. (Only too little gravy.)

What an contrast to the endless piles of slop we wade through reading Internet reviews, to the well-known bifurcation into the 5-star “This worked great and did exactly what it said” reviews and the 1-star “THIS WAS TRASH!!!” Our social media websites have become consumed with rage-bait and with lies. Our TVs turned on the “breaking-news” chyrons years ago, and never turned them off. The online comments sections of newspapers are so depraved that “never read the comments” has become a truth universally acknowledged.

But the Harvest Fair notes? Pure, unalloyed, gratitude.

I don’t think that’s a mistake. The way we treat one another, in real communities, face to face, is just different from the way we behave online, obscured from one another by usernames or keyboards, shades of meaning stripped away by being transcribed to text. I’m willing to acknowledge the irony of writing this to you in an email newsletter, and I know that many of you read this from far afield. But I also know it to be true that as online communications becomes more and more widespread, our face-to-face, embodied communities become more important than they have ever been.

I’m incredibly grateful to all of you who made a delightful community event like the Harvest Fair possible, but more than that: I’m incredibly grateful for all of you who make a delightful community like ours possible at all.