A Visit To Suffern, NY

I'm in New York this week, attending to a little business and a little pleasure.

Decided to tear myself away from everything else to do a makeup meeting at the Suffern, NY Rotary. It's an 80-year-old club with 35 members and a nice bunch of folks - just what you'd expect from RI.

There were some interesting coincidences to this make-up meeting. For instance:

* Several years ago when my brother-in-law passed away, my wife's sister was asked to take care of the children. Money understandably became tight in short order, and this club adopted my sister-in-law's family for the holidays.

* I sat next to a fellow at lunch whose good friend goes to my temple in San Diego.

There were the usual connections to be made, of course. One guy had a business lead for me, I had a real estate connection for someone whose daughter just moved to SD. Like that.

There were some other points of interest, too. This club gives out about 2,500 saplings to elementary school kids (each year) - an idea I'm getting more details on in hopes we can do something similar. However, they don't do much on publicity (we talked about ways they might improve that). They pray at the beginning of the meeting, which didn't appeal to me, and haven't gotten into the Rotarians At Work program yet (though they were all over the idea).

The similarities were more than the differences, though. They do the dictionary project, had the local firefighters in to speak to us and give a presentation, collect happy dollars (they actually pass the bucket to each person to contribute. However they don't spin the wheel).

Incoming president Larry told me he's never gone to a club where they spin the wheel (I invited him to do a makeup at our club). Interestingly, when I brought a flag with me from our club, the president told me she'd never had anyone give her a flag, and they didn't have one to give me to bring back. Larry will get one to me before I leave town to close the loop.

The food was good, the company enjoyable, and the $15 well invested. I'm very glad I went.