the live-in staff and directing programs for pre-adolescents. Connie had gone downtown to work at Thompson Children's Home.

Transcription

1 In celebration of the service of Eddie & Connie Beach 2014 recipients of the Jack Burney Community Service Award Presented by a grateful town on November 26, 2014 A little more than five years ago, we citizens of Davidson were hard at work, creating a comprehensive plan to guide development and growth in ways that best reflect the values of our little town. The goal was to provide guideposts for future leaders as they steered Davidson through the opportunities and challenges, large and small, that are ever-present in a vital community. It was an enormous enterprise, not least because we were committed to speaking as a collective voice that would step beyond a mere aggregation of individual interests. In trying to get our arms around the charge we had given ourselves, we asked folks to name the "sacred spaces" of Davidson. These were places that give us our sense of community. They bear witness to the story of who we are and whom we aspire to be; they are the claimed corners of Davidson. In holding them up we pledged go to the mat to preserve and protect them. As I write this citation I'm seated at a picnic table on Fisher Farm, one of those sacred spaces. It won't surprise anyone in the room to hear that the Town Green also held a prominent spot on the list. But back in 2009, not one spade of earth had been turned in what would open a new chapter in our embrace and understanding of Davidson's sacred spaces. Seeds, however, had been sown decades before. Thirty years ago this January, Connie and Eddie Beach decided to make Davidson their home. Eddie was a 1968 graduate of Davidson College, and Connie had graduated from Mary Baldwin College in She'd spent a year at Davidson as part of what she describes as "Sam Spencer's clever experiment to introduce co-education to the College." After graduation, both of today's honorees had pursued careers in education. Eddie landed at Barium Springs Home for Children, and served in a variety of positions over the years, including supervising

2 the live-in staff and directing programs for pre-adolescents. Connie had gone downtown to work at Thompson Children's Home. According to Connie, she first spied Eddie at the coffee and donuts table at a conference the two attended and thought he might just be worth a second look. Here's where Eddie and Connie's story takes an interesting twist: no sooner had they met than Connie was called to interview for a job at Barium Springs. Through a further series of coincidences it was Eddie who interviewed Connie to become the facility's first education coordinator, a position she had actually pitched to Barium Springs. She got the job, and I suspect it may have been the very first and the very last time that Eddie played the role of interviewer in this particular partnership! Further along the way, Eddie accepted a job as Youth Director at Davidson College Presbyterian Church, and Connie and Eddie became the parents of two sons, Brendan and Kevin. The family traveled whenever it could. Eddie eventually moved from DCPC, just down the road to the Y, where he continued for an additional 21 years to minister to our area's youth, teaching several generations of Davidsonians to swim and love the water. And Connie, embracing her affinity for travel, turned a very part-time job, helping friends plan their itineraries, to a full-time job as the travel agent to whom we all turn. Now, at this point, I'll acknowledge for the archivists and historians, professional and amateur, in the room that what I've recounted constitutes only the briefest overview of waypoints in two lives well lived. Here's why. I learned all that I've just recounted, sitting on the front porch of Eddie and Connie's South Street home and sipping tea one beautiful, fall afternoon just a couple of weeks ago. As we visited I couldn't help but notice that both Connie and Eddie seemed always to be pushing the conversation forward. It wasn't at all that they were reluctant to reminisce, but rather that their focus was so highly trained on the here and now. And that focus seemed to embody their approach to life. As Eddie said at one point, "It's all about staying open to what presents itself."

3 Well, here's what presented itself: a community garden, or more precisely put, the vaguest notion of a community garden. For some of us it was the latest fashion in planning and civic engagement. For others it was a return to wholesome eating and simpler times. For the members of the Davidson Ministerial Association it was, says Eddie, a project that they "could do together." Those of us who serve in leadership positions know that there's not much to a notion if you don't find the right people to give it flesh and bones and feed it. Davidson's clergy, most particularly, Jody Seymour, knew just whom to tap when he reached out to Connie with the whole notion swirling in the ether. Sitting here today, it's easy to forget that just five years ago there was no "there" there as regards a community garden. No plot of land. No water source. No garden plan. No labor. No tools. No yield. Just the barest outlines of an idea. And a mission. "Right off the bat," says Connie, "we knew we wanted the food to go to Ada Jenkins." What she'll also pretty quickly tell you is that she didn't have much experience growing food. A nice size piece of land--one that had been previously gardened by a single individual--fell into the sights of the garden crew, but, like most things in this town, it took a partnership and a good amount of connecting to secure the College-owned site. Secured, yes. But cultivated, no. According to Eddie, "We were looking at a weedy, logged up field." Connie credits Eddie with charting the garden's next steps. "He had this idea with the newspapers, layering them and composting." Let us pause now for a reading from the Gospel of Eddie, in which he enjoins us: "Nature doesn't till. You're breaking up your friends, and turning up seeds you don't need." It's tempting to want to dissect that passage and use it as the potential metaphor it is for civic planning, but we all get too much of that sort of thing in this room anyway. Suffice to say that the wisdom in Eddie's and Connie's "take it as it comes" approach has given us far more than a garden. It has produced an ever growing yield to feed the shoppers at the Loaves and Fishes food pantry--closing in on 2,000 pounds of produce in this season alone. It offers families, schoolchildren, retirees, and everyone in between opportunities to work and

4 grow together. Says Connie: "We keep it simple. Just show up on Saturday... And people do. It always seems to be about the right number." The garden serves as a landmark for giving directions and as a meeting place for gathering friends. And in a town, founded for and dedicated to education, it stokes new learning. Eddie and Connie both point to new vegetables and gardening techniques introduced by folks who just seem to find their way to the garden. My own students, as well as many others, have had their first look at the greenness of their thumbs in the garden. Coming soon: cooking classes to put those new vegetables to good use. Now I know very little about gardening myself, but it seems to me that there's a vast difference between tending a garden and being a gardener. For the latter, expertise and experience are the coin of the realm. Gardeners make demands of their gardens. The garden, when it cooperates, bends to the will of the gardener. Tending a garden, on the other hand, is an exercise in seeing potential and following where it leads. The garden sets the tone, and the ones who tend it sense and respond to its cues. In the call and response rhythm that the garden and those who tend it follow, they find mutual strengths and build upon them. This community has the great fortune to be awash in citizens who are gardeners, people whose depth of expertise and breadth of experience allow them to will things into existence. The evidence is all around us: award-winning specimens of governance and planning, bestpractice hybrids of education and nonprofit work, and enviable varieties of retail shops, restaurants, and service businesses. In our sacred spaces exercise back in 2009, many of the places we named, including Fisher Farm and the Town Green, owed their existence to a gardener, a champion, who had so believed in the rightness of a vision and his or her own ability to make it real. That creative drive might in itself be the basis for the vibrancy of this town. Its sustainability, however, is dependent on those visionaries among us who have the selfconfidence to believe not just in their own power, but in the strength of the people of this community. They are the tenders of our collective garden. They've no shortage of ideas and goals, but the gift they offer all of us is to allow us opportunities to step up and take the reins. Their trust in the validity of our own notions and experience keeps the garden fertile and

5 productive. That these garden tenders celebrate outcomes that they themselves had not foreseen or directed is their greatest strength and the considerable yield that this town reaps. We are here today, Eddie and Connie, not merely to celebrate the lives of service the two of you have lived among us these many years. We are here to acknowledge that you have coaxed and nurtured an enduring sacred space in our midst. It has the potential to build the bridges we crave generationally, racially, and economically. Its very location seeks to tie the two halves of our town together. But what makes it most authentically ours is that you two alone cannot cultivate and sustain it. It needs willing hands, and you have had the great wisdom to make space for collective inspiration and effort. Perhaps the best of a life of service is that it nudges all of us toward embracing our own roles as community members. It is our charge here today to endeavor not to let you down. Eddie and Connie, your community salutes you and the promise of a new harvest that you have made possible for us.