The Policy Breakfast That Lost Its Quorum
Our monthly farm policy breakfast in Amarillo was called to order, and then a big Panhandle tumbleweed took the vacant chair.
Every first Tuesday, a dozen of us gather at a diner off Interstate 40 to talk farm policy over eggs and biscuits. We have a chairman, a secretary, and a rule that nobody talks while the waitress is pouring. I have been going for nineteen years, and I can tell you the meeting has never once started on time, because someone is always out in the lot looking at somebody else's new truck.
On the morning I am describing, the wind was blowing about forty out of the southwest, which is Panhandle weather for a Tuesday. The chairman, a retired wheat man named Orville, banged his coffee cup for order. We had a bare quorum, seven of us, and a long agenda, with item one being the price of fertilizer and item two being whether we wanted to write a letter. Then the front door opened, and in came a tumbleweed.
I want to be clear that it was a large one, about the size of a washing machine, and it came in with a certain confidence. The door had been propped for a delivery. It bounced down the aisle, past the pie case, and stopped right at our table, where it settled itself against the empty chair next to Orville like a late arrival. The waitress, a woman named Rita who has seen everything, brought it a glass of water. She set it on the floor beside it and moved on.
Orville looked at the tumbleweed, then at the agenda, then at the rest of us. He cleared his throat and said, for the record, that the secretary would note the presence of an additional attendee. The secretary wrote it down. We voted, seven to nothing, to allow the tumbleweed to remain through the rest of the breakfast, on condition that it not speak. It sat there through fertilizer and through the letter, and it was, I am told, the most agreeable member we have ever had. A guide on farm money is the only thing I would say was more useful. We carried the minutes to the next meeting, and the tumbleweed was gone by then, having blown off in the night to whatever committee it served. Our friends at farm.FM printed the minutes in full.