Bram has a theory. Bram always has a theory. The theory this week — and I want to be clear that last week's theory was about why Bar Harbor's construction timeline was "actually a civic communication failure, not an infrastructure failure" — is that America doesn't have a loneliness crisis. America has a poor event architecture crisis.
"Nobody hosts anymore," he said, standing in my kitchen at 7 a.m. with a legal pad, because Bram is a man who still uses legal pads, who buys them with intention. "The dinner party didn't die because people got busy. It died because nobody thought about flow."
I asked him what flow meant.
He looked at me like I'd asked what oxygen was.
The dinner party was scheduled for Saturday. It was Wednesday. By Thursday he had a printed seating chart, a Spotify queue with a buffer playlist he called "the ambient on-ramp," and a philosophy about candle height that I am not going to repeat here because it would take four paragraphs and I only have so much time on this earth.
He was inviting nine people: two bartenders from a place on Cottage Street who he described as "grounding presences," his friend Niall who does something with boats, a woman named Harriet from the chamber networking event he'd attended Tuesday under the premise of "doing research," and several others I'd met once. Harriet, it should be noted, had mentioned she loved dinner parties. Bram had mentioned this to me four times.
"She said it like she meant it," he said.
"That's how most people say things," I said.
He bought a tablecloth. He went to the farmers' market and had a twenty-minute conversation with a man about root vegetables that he relayed to me in full. He made a beet salad with "a goat cheese situation on top" that he photographed from multiple angles and then did not post anywhere. He read two articles about hosting — one of which was, and I am not making this up, the Atlantic piece about the death of the dinner party — and then cited it aloud from memory at dinner like a toast.
Saturday hit fifty-eight degrees and breezy by six o'clock, the way October coastal Maine does where it looks fine until you're standing still and suddenly it's actually November inside your body. Bram had lit candles on the porch anyway. He'd placed them at what he called "conversationally optimal intervals." One blew out immediately. He relit it. It blew out again. He brought it inside and put it near the window, which he said "preserved the intention."
Niall arrived twenty minutes late and brought a six-pack of something from a brewery two towns over, which Bram accepted with the grace of a man swallowing a complaint.
Harriet arrived exactly on time. She looked at the table — the tablecloth, the beet situation, the small handwritten cards with everyone's names, the single candle flickering valiantly near the window — and said, "Oh, you committed."
Bram said, "I had some thoughts about flow."
She laughed. Not a polite laugh. A real one.
Here is the thing about Bram that I always forget until I'm watching it happen: the chaos is entirely visible, the spreadsheet energy is a little much, the legal pad is genuinely alarming, and somehow none of it is the point. The point is that he actually made the beet salad. He actually lit the candles. He actually wanted everyone at that table to have a good time badly enough to hand-write nine name cards on a Wednesday night while listening to what he called the "pre-ambient on-ramp."
We stayed at the table for three and a half hours. Niall told a story about a boat that had everyone crying laughing. One of the bartenders knew Harriet from a pelagic birding trip in September and they talked about that for forty-five minutes while Bram visibly tried to figure out if this was good for flow or bad for flow and then decided it was good.
He refilled everyone's glasses before they asked. He did it without getting up, which is a trick I've never understood.
When people finally left, he stood at the door and said, "See, the issue was never loneliness. People want to connect. They just need someone to architect it."
Harriet, on her way out, said she thought he might be right.
He closed the door.
He turned around.
He did not say anything for a long moment.
"Flow," he said quietly, to no one. "Nailed it."