Curry Night ended forever last night.
It'd been about a year since I last made it to Curry Night.
Even so, I'm sad to see it go.
To say Curry Night changed my life would simply be the tip of a very large ice berg.
It's where I met Alexandra after all. But it was more; so much more.
Curry Night entered my life during one of the darkest periods through which I've ever lived.
I was living at home, struggling to raise money to start at Hillsdale. A friend from church invited me initially, and the rest is a sort of history.
What exactly was Curry Night and why did it matter so much?
From the looks of it, it was just a house full of people enjoying a lot of free Indian food, every Tuesday night. That's all I knew about it when I went. Ultimately, that's all it needed to be, and from there, the rest followed.
It was a place where truly, literally, always, everyone was welcome. There was an inherent, tangible value attributed to each and every person who walked across the threshold. If you had no friends and walked through the door, you'd leave with half a dozen and you'd feel like you knew them for your whole life.
It was just an open table-- all were welcome and the ball started rolling.
Curry Night entered my life just when I needed it-- it can't and hasn't been replaced. Probably 10 of my top 25 memories from my lifetime are directly tied to Curry Night- and hundreds more indirectly. It wasn't some kind of club- it was a place where everyone belonged. To that extent, for a few hours every Tuesday, it was a sort of heaven on Earth.
It's all over now and there's a hole in the hearts of probably hundreds of Findlay residents (past and present) today.
But the memories will last forever, and, to bring the cliche home, the relationships will never end.
I can count at least 4 marriages from Curry Night and that's barely a drip on the barometer of the sorts of important relationships that started at Curry. Heck- one of the driving forces behind my ultimate decision to go to law school was a conversations at- where else- Curry Night. That was actually my last Curry Night. Fitting really- forever and ever, Curry Night will have changed the course of my life- and I know I'm not alone.
I used to drive at least 8 hours per month so I could go to Curry night every other week. It kept me sane during the harrowing Hillsdale months.
For the record, as soon as I got to Hillsdale, about 1.5 months after my first Curry Night, I never struggled with funding again and left staff with a monstrous surplus. God knew what he was doing, to say the least.
Though I (and no one else) will ever attend another Curry Night, we've all got the picture of what life can be on this side of heaven- and if all 300 or so of us keep seeking and creating it- the world, too, is going to change because of it.
It was a fire we all built in our own little ways. It's burned out now, through the unavoidable facts of life- but there's no reason we can't each go on to our own new place and start a new one with the kindling gleaned over the past 4 years.
-Zack
"I know I'm a lucky man to count on both hands the ones I love"
-Pearl Jam
No comments:
Post a Comment