Ninety People, One Small Hall, and a Ceiling I Kept Looking At

Our street runs a lunch every Freedom Day. It started years ago as one family putting out a pot on the pavement and it has grown, the way these things do when nobody officially decides they should, into a proper sit down meal for anyone on the road who wants to come. Old people who live alone. The families with too many mouths and not enough month. The two brothers at number twelve who never say much but always arrive early to help carry. Somewhere along the way I became the person who organises it, mostly because I made the mistake of being good at it once.

This past year we expected the biggest turnout we had ever had, because the street has filled up with new families, and I stood in my kitchen in April doing sums on a notepad and realising that the thing that was going to defeat me was not the food. It was where ninety people were going to sit.

The chair problem nobody warns you about

You do not think about chairs until you need ninety of them. Food you understand instinctively, you cook more, you make the pots bigger, you ask three aunties instead of one. But seating is a hard number. Either a person has somewhere to sit or they are standing awkwardly holding a plate against their chest, and there is no half measure. Ninety people is ninety seats, and I had, when I counted honestly across the whole street, maybe thirty five assorted kitchen chairs, most of which no owner wanted to lend because they were part of a matching set and lending one felt like sending a child off to war.

We booked the church hall down the road, which solved the roof and the floor but not the furniture, because the hall had a stack of ancient wooden chairs that were heavy as sin, full of splinters, and about forty short of what we needed. I spent one entire Saturday testing them and came away with a splinter in my thumb and the certain knowledge that we could not seat the elders on those. My grandmother is eighty three. She was not going to spend Freedom Day perched on a wooden torture device that predated democracy.

Borrow, buy, or beg

I tried borrowing first, because that is the South African way, you phone around, you call in favours. A cousin who does events said he could lend me a stack but he needed them back Sunday morning and our lunch ran into the evening, so that fell through. The school would only lend to registered organisations and we are just a street with a pot. I even priced hiring, and the hire company wanted a delivery fee, a collection fee, a deposit, and a per chair rate that, multiplied by fifty, made my notepad sums look silly.

It was my neighbour Rashieda who said the sensible thing over the fence one evening. She said, you do this every single year and every single year you fight over chairs, so stop hiring other people's problems and just buy the street its own. Once. And keep them. She was right in the annoying way that neighbours are right, and I went home and actually thought about it as an investment rather than an expense.

The kind everybody uses for exactly this, the stackable resin ones, turned out to be far more affordable than I had assumed, especially when I stopped thinking about a single day and started thinking about the ten Freedom Days after it. I found what I needed looking at plastic chairs for sale and did the maths again, and the maths said that owning was cheaper than hiring twice, and we host more than twice a year if you count the December thing and the two funerals we sadly always end up seating.

The day the boxes arrived

Fifty chairs arrive as a surprisingly small stack, which is the whole point of them, and the street came out to see, because nothing on our road stays private for longer than eleven minutes. The men from number twelve carried them in without being asked. My grandmother sat down on one immediately to test it, which is her way of approving of something, and pronounced it acceptable, which from her is a standing ovation.

There is a particular comfort in a light chair when you are the one setting up. I could carry four at a time. I could stack them out of the way when we needed the floor clear for the children's dancing, and pull them back out in seconds when the food was ready. An ordinary plastic chair is not a thing anyone writes poems about, but at three in the afternoon on a hot day, with an eighty three year old woman needing to sit and eat with her dignity intact, it becomes one of the most important objects in the building.

We ran short by about ten anyway, because more people came than even I had guessed, which is the best kind of failure to have. We put the wooden hall chairs on the ends where the young strong cousins sat and gave every soft resin seat to whoever needed it most, and it worked, and nobody stood holding a plate against their chest, and I stopped looking at the ceiling and counting.

The wedding I could suddenly say yes to

Here is the part I did not expect. Owning the chairs changed what our street could offer, not just what it could survive. Two months after Freedom Day, one of the new families, the young couple at number seven, decided to marry, and they did not have the budget for a hired venue with everything included. Somebody mentioned that the street had chairs now, and would we, and of course we would.

But a wedding is not a street lunch, and the plain resin chairs that were perfect for feeding the road did not feel right for a bride. So we did something I would never have imagined myself doing a year earlier, which is that we looked into hiring the pretty ones, the clear ones that everyone wants for weddings, just for the day, just for the ceremony rows. The bride had her heart set on the elegant transparent kind, the Tiffany chairs you see at every fancy function, and there is a whole different world of hiring those, dressed up with sashes and cushions, that has nothing to do with feeding ninety hungry neighbours off a splintery stack.

We used our own everyday chairs for the reception, where the aunties sat and gossiped and the children spilled cooldrink, and the borrowed elegant ones only for the actual vows, and the difference between the two suddenly made complete sense to me. There is a chair for surviving and a chair for celebrating, and a street that hosts life properly ends up needing to understand both.

What the chairs really bought

The stack lives in Rashieda's garage now, because she has the space and she volunteered, which on our road is how a thing becomes permanent. Every few weeks somebody knocks on her gate because they are having people over, or there is a prayer meeting, or a child's birthday spilled past the size of one lounge, and the chairs go out and come back, and slowly they have become a shared thing that belongs to no one and everyone.

I thought I was solving a seating problem. What I actually bought, for less than the price of hiring twice, was the ability to say yes. Yes to the lunch that outgrew us, yes to the wedding we could not have hosted, yes to the funerals nobody wants but everybody needs seating for. My notepad sums never had a line for that. You cannot really put a number on a street that can seat itself, on demand, whenever life asks it to. But I looked at my grandmother, comfortable and fed and holding court from her light little chair on Freedom Day, and I thought, that was the best money this road ever spent together.