BRIGHTON, TN — My name is Connie Aldridge, I am 67 years old, and I have set the tables in the Calvary Ridge Baptist fellowship hall for every potluck, bereavement luncheon, and VBS closing ceremony since the spring of 2012. I do not have a title. I do not have a helper. I have a rolling cart, a steamer that stopped producing steam in 2019, and forty-six tablecloths I have personally laundered in my own home for reasons no one ever asked me to explain.

The tablecloths are beige. They were beige when I started. They will be beige when I am gone. Several of them have a faint stain near the far left corner that I believe originated at the 2015 chili cookoff. I have treated it eleven times. It remains. We have an understanding.

“I do not need recognition. I need someone to stop laying a potluck dish directly on the tablecloth before I have finished putting down the serving pads. You know who you are. I will not be saying your name.”

“I always assumed the tables just… happened,” said Brenda Hollis, 54, a fourteen-year member of Calvary Ridge who has attended approximately sixty fellowship dinners during that period. “I guess I never thought about it.” She did not appear troubled by this.

In 2021, the church purchased a new set of round folding tables. No one informed me. I arrived the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to find forty-six rectangular tablecloths and sixteen round tables. I adapted. I always adapt.

At press time, I had finished setting all sixteen tables for Sunday’s spring potluck, returned home, and received a group text asking if anyone knew where the tablecloths were kept.