Last week I was in the Mill cleaning and organizing, sprucing the place up for Open Mic on Friday. I was alone and it started to impact me, being there again, just how much this place means to me. We bought the building four years ago. My son Marty and Noah, David and I, did much of the renovation ourselves to save money. It was a real labor of love to restore the old building to it's former glory. The beams across the main room and the panels on the walls are cut from the first forests of New England. It is truly a historic place. Working with Arnold Graton Jnr. was an honor. He is an amazingly talented third generation expert on historic buildings. It was his detective work that confirmed the date and identification of the main room and back of the building to be the 1767 Grist Mill mentioned in the History of Bristol. In that main room, we have had many precious memories. The Uncle Steve band played their first gig together after they formed. Joshua and Melissa had recently re located to NH from the New Orleans area, after literally outrunning Hurricane Katrina with two small children in their car. It was while running the business that Noah develop from a kid fresh out of college to a mature and very capable business man. Our special friendship with Terry, ‘The Ice-Cream Man’ began when he quietly joined us late one night as we were painting the sign for the front of the building. We were trying to get it finished and up for the 4th July which was the next day and it was already ten o’clock. He was still there painting his end of teh sign, long after midnight. Since then we have leaned on Terry’s broad shoulders many times as he told us to, “Take it down a notch,” when we were freaking out about some crisis or other. We celebrated with him last year when he became a Grandfather.
Dawn, our first front shop person gave birth to Symphony,(We named a swirl-in after her!) and managed to keep working with us till later when twin boys came along! Lately we have shared with her and her husband the trauma and frustration as the whole Mica building drama unfolded, their house is on the other side of the Mica building. There have been sad times too. Meghan, who makes our fudge, lost her only sister in a terrible accident on 93 when her car hit a moose. It was in the main room, not our home, that David and I, Noah and Brynie, Marty and his girlfriend, waited till the early hours with a bottle of Champagne to celebrate the birth of our first grandchild almost two years ago. When Noah's mother called and asked, soberly, to be taken off the speaker phone because something had gone terribly wrong, and we learned that our grandchild was born with a Chromosome 4 depletion and we, as a family, would all have very severe challenges in the years to come.
The room has been filled with the best music New England has to offer, from Rocking with Joel Cage, to bluegreass to Gypsy Jazz and Celtic. At open mic on a Friday, we have watched as person after person has developed their performance skills, safe in the knowledge that they are among supportive friends. We have burst into spontaneous music jams, singing and dancing. Noah, David and I have had intense meetings where we thought there was no way we could survive financially, and then we did. Often with the wonderful help of Stewart, our advisor from the NH Small Business Development Center.
It was in this room that very respectable people like, Miss Purple the local school teacher, became a groupie of a band for the first time in her life, and shamelessly follows the Uncle Steve Band to all their gigs :) We have had poetry readings and play readings, we have crashed on a blow up mattress on the stage, when the snow was too deep for us to reach our place in the woods, and dipped in the river to cool off on a hot sticky summer night when cleaning up after an event seemed endless.
Most of all, we have fulfilled our desire to be a part of a community. To walk down the street and be able to say hello to people we know. To have a place where over many years, we can make good things happen. We feel we have hardly started. We have so many ideas and plans for our business, and the community that supports it. Now that we are back, we are so looking forward to enjoying the unfolding of great times, great music, and many, many more happy memories.
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