Thanksgiving

All photos by Deb Marshall, 2016

I know a woman who many would consider poor. She and her spouse work several jobs to make ends meet; their retirement plan is to win the lottery. And yet, because they are well-rooted in community and have supportive family, they aren’t the poorest of the poor.  They can’t take vacations or buy the stuff most people have come to think of as essential that really isn’t; but they have a house, grow a garden, and their cars work.

One of her jobs is teaching, and for several years she taught at a community college where I also teach, which is how I come to know this story.  One day the woman noticed a metal locker near the back doors of the college, and on her way out she stopped to investigate. A sign announced it was a food locker – this college had the grace to provide a place where food donations could be left for students who were struggling to get by.

Students at community colleges come from all kinds of situations. When the woman asked a custodian about the locker, he told her he sometimes discovered students living in their cars in the college’s back lot.  Maybe they had enough money to make it to school, but not enough to buy gas to drive back and forth several times a week, or to rent a place to stay. It didn’t happen often, he said, but when it did he’d leave the doors unlocked late on school nights so those students could come in to use the showers and the cafeteria microwave after the other students had left. Those students depended on the food locker, and there were a host of others who used it regularly - usually late in the day, when no one would likely notice.

The school requested food donations once or twice a year, and sometimes student groups ran a food drive. But when the woman looked into the locker, she saw that not much was there: some granola bars, packages of ramen noodles, boxes of cold cereal, and odd items that had long ago expired – probably cleaned out of a pantry when the owner realized he’d never eat them.

The woman left troubled by the story she’d heard and the paucity she’d seen. She decided to make the locker her project. She often donated an item or two to the food pantry boxes at the supermarket, but decided, instead, to see what she could add to the locker each week. Twenty dollars a week, she reasoned, wouldn’t break her; twenty dollars was the price of a pizza and salad. Some weeks twenty dollars would be more than she had, and other weeks she wouldn’t miss it. Weeks she couldn’t afford it, the locker would stay bare, but here was an opportunity to make a difference. She took it.

The woman decided she needed some rules, and number one was that whatever she brought to the locker had to be truly nutritious. What she brought each week would have to make a complete meal, not require cold storage, and could be cooked in a single pot or in a microwave. She soon discovered that buying items at regular grocery stores meant she couldn’t buy much; but there were discount stores, and discount coupons in the Sunday papers, and she made the most of both.

She started with the obvious: cans of tuna and chicken and ham, small jars of mayonnaise, a loaf of grainy bread, cans of soup, and tins of beans, chili peppers, salsa, small bags of rice, tortillas. Jars of spaghetti sauce, with pasta made with vegetable flour or high protein flour or rice flour or potatoes for extra nutrition. She brought bottles of juice and tins of fruit with no sugar; tinned vegetables of all kinds, and simple condiments in small-frig sizes, with some basics – salt and pepper, garlic powder, catsup, mustard, vinegar, oil, tamari.  

 Everything she brought disappeared by the next week. She brought a winter squash, bulbs of garlic, a ginger root; a small bag of flour; jars of grains, a bag of potatoes, one of carrots; dried sausages and cheeses, peanut butter, hot cereals, milk in asceptic boxes. Sometimes she left coupons for frozen foods, coffee, buy-one get-one-free meals at local restaurants. At exam time, she made sure there was instant coffee, hot cocoa mixes, and she always brought bags of nuts and seeds. Everything flew off the shelves.

She left a little notebook with a question: Do you need anything?  Sometimes there were messages: I loved the black beans; Thank you, you have no idea how much this helps; I can’t often get to the food pantry, you have saved me; Someone gave me many jars of this food, I’m leaving some for others to share.  The longer she brought food, the more the woman enjoyed doing it, and she looked forward to finding foods that would best nourish her invisible diners.

Friends discovered her project and they contributed bags of food from time to time. Some students found her out and would quietly appear to help stock the shelves.  One of them said, shyly: You know – sometimes it isn’t just food that poor students need. The woman thought about that, and once a month she’d bring toothbrushes, dental floss, tooth paste, soap and shampoo, hand cream, razors, tampons, deodorant, chapped -lip soothers.  These items were taken away nearly as fast as the food. 

As the shelves emptied every week, the woman said she felt her heart filling up with a special kind of light, and every item she placed on the shelves placed a flower of joy in her soul.  Her project used up some money she could have used for herself; but, she said, it brought her as much nourishment as she dispensed, and renewed thanksgiving weekly.

We Foreigners

Festival of Lights, Chinese Garden at the Botanical Gardens, 2016

We try to go to Canada at least once a year; it’s important to escape from your own country every so often and the urge becomes almost desperate pretty much every four years. 

Getting out restores to the mind a spaciousness that gets lost when too engaged in the blow-by-blow horror show in our home country. It’s a strange relief to not have a clue about most of what’s going on around you because your grasp of the language everyone else is speaking is rudimentary or non-existent. It also impresses on you how very much other peoples have a nice sense of humor about themselves, and how very much we in the US don’t.

When you drive north headed for Montreal – Montreal, doncha know, can be a day-trip from our neck of the woods: when the Husband and I were younger and more energetic, we’d drive there just for supper  – and you get to the place where the Canadians decide whether or not to let you in, you get your first taste of a different sense of humor. 

One year, up we went in the van the Husband had painted what our local cop called “psychedelic,” and then covered completely with glued-on stuff: giant black flies, rubber chickens, rubber duckies, sunglasses, Star Wars figures, old CDs … lots and lots of stuff. We fully expected to be stopped, frisked down, thoroughly investigated before we were let over the border, if we were let over the border. The Canadian border cop took a look; got out of his booth; strolled slowly around the van once, twice, a third time; went back into his booth; looked thoughtful for a moment; then asked, “Why did you do that?” and waved us through.

For a distance you drive through mile after mile of very flat farmland. One year we were lucky enough to be there when the Canada geese were migrating. The fields, and the skies, were filled with thousands and thousands of geese, all headed south but stopping at these farms to rest and fill up on harvest gleanings on their way. It was amazing and awesome.

Suddenly, you’ll be outside the city, going over one of the magnificent bridges. Montreal is on an island, and it’s compact, orderly, and easy to drive around in.  You’ll need to change money – with any luck you’ll have an experience like I once did. “Oh,” I exclaimed to the Indian woman who was changing my drab US dollars for Canada’s bright-colored, newly plasticized, artistic folding money and a few double-ringed loonies, “Canadian money is so beautiful!” “Not to be insulting,” she patted my hand comfortingly and replied in perfect, French-by-way-of-India-accented English, “but your money is truly ugly.” 

There’s stuff in Montreal that’s like our stuff, but different; and there’s different stuff there that we don’t have. Brother regularly goes up on his motorcycle just to buy bagels. We always go to the semi-enclosed Jean Talon market, to buy vinegars and cheeses and chocolates and pickled wild mushrooms and other wonders we can’t get in the US, to eat and drink little bits here and there at the various stalls, to marvel at the amazing and gorgeous displays of vegetables and fruits that can’t go back over the border with us, but that we can gobble greedily on our way back to the States. There are colleges – why, we wonder, did it never occur to us to go to college there? There are people from everywhere. There’s lots and lots of art and music and performance – Cirque du Soleil! Jazz! Film! Street performers! There’s terrible Italian food and wonderful Indian food, and there’s French-Canadian food that puts me in a memory-spin of my grandmother LaLiberte. There’s a botanical garden with wondrous things in it, especially during the October lantern festival in the Chinese garden. There’s history, so much like ours, so much shared, and yet – so different.

And after years of traveling north, still so much to explore.

When you spend a day, or several days, trying to read signs in someone else’s language, and being grateful for the kind strangers who listen to you struggle to sound coherent in their language, then answer you kindly in your own language for the difficult bits and in their language for the parts they can tell you’ll understand, perspective shifts. The mind opens up, and so does the heart. We are surrounded by people who are fluent in several languages. We have navigated places and circumstances where we were not only not in control, but were quite uncertain. We’ve eaten things we can barely pronounce.

All photos c Charley Freiberg, 2016

We’ve needed to rely on the kindness of strangers.  We’ve needed to ask for help. We’ve been grateful, not once, but many times. We’ve marveled at differences and similarities. We’ve fallen in love with the light, the smells, the sensations, the energy of a strange place.

We go home to dream of northern light, of Quebecois lilt. We aren’t – quite - the same people who left New Hampshire in the morning. 

Originally published in The Concord Monitor, November 20, 2016, as “Canada: A Love Story.”

 

Stories from the Edge of Darkness

Photo copyright Charley Freiberg

I made a vow the day after the election. 

As those of you who read my last post know, I never wanted to write about politics, but I did it once, and in it I said we need to stand up to the evil acts that this election is making certain people feel have been legitimized. I said we need to make sure the people doing evil know that we see what they’re doing, and say, loudly and clearly, that it’s not all right.

I’m a fairly insulated person – not often actually out in public, and the folks who are lying on my table waiting for acupuncture are not likely to be spouting nastiness where I can hear it – after all, they’re very aware of who’s actually in charge of the very sharp needles, as my acupuncture teacher used to say. But they tell me stories from their lives, from the lives of people they know.

As well as being someone who regularly and enthusiastically stabs total strangers with sharp objects, and sometimes sets them on fire or gives them alien-looking cupping hickies, I’m a writer. My way of seeing and saying is mostly going to be through the written word. This post, and the articles and letters to everyone and their brother that I will write, are going to be the way I fulfill my vow to get in people’s faces when truth needs to be told, and when evil can’t be left not commented upon. 

In my last post, I said I’d heard from two people who had experienced election-results evil. In the last four days, I’ve heard three more stories. That’s about a 400% increase over similar stories I’ve heard in the past ten years – not a good sign of things to come.  I want to share these stories with you, and urge you to share them with others. If you want me to send you printed copies – I have no idea if one can print something from a blog – email me, and I’ll be happy to send a copy by email so you can share. And please, give everyone my blog address, and encourage them to read and pass it on.

Two of the stories I heard were about children. These stories are local stories, from Concord, Lebanon, Claremont – not some far-off place where we expect weird and uncomfortable stuff to happen. And these stories are about people being nasty to other people in person, not on paper, not in the electronic world, which can be bad enough. These stories are about people looming over other people, pushing them, and screaming into their faces. These stories – if they happened to any of us – would scare us out of our wits.

The first story is about a 16-year-old transgender person, who was born, as it happens, an American citizen – though that shouldn’t matter – but whose skin is darker than lily-white, as this teen takes after a parent who is of Latin extraction. This kid has lived and gone to school in the same place for always. The students who attacked were - had been - long-time friends; and to whom this teen painfully, and believed successfully, came out, a couple of years ago.

But the day after the election, this kid was surrounded by fellow students, who got too close, and spoke with hard voices: “Now you have to go away. You can’t be transgender anymore. It’s illegal. And we don’t want you.”

I asked the student’s mom, from whom I heard the story: Did you call the principal? And she said, “No; what if the principal feels the same way?” and I said, “Then you call the superintendent of schools.” And she said, “And what if the superintendent --- they don’t like transgender people. We have to wait and see; maybe it’ll calm down. But my kid – my kid is crying, and scared.”

The second story is about a brave 10-year-old, of Puerto-Rican extraction, whose family comes from NYC. This branch of the family has lived in NH for the child’s entire life. His mom told me this story:

The day after the election, her son found a group of big kids, older kids, in the schoolyard surrounding a little 5-year-old girl; an immigrant family’s child. They were pushing her, and wouldn’t let her go, and shouted at her: You don’t belong here. Now we have a new president, you have to go back to your own country. We don’t want you.

The brave 10-year-old, who, his mom told me, is a fairly rugged kid, pushed his way into the circle and stood in front of the little girl, protecting her until a teacher got there and broke up the incident. His mom said he never said anything about it to her; she found out when, that night, she got calls from teachers, the school principal, and the parents of the little child he’d protected, thanking her for raising such a good son, praising him for his courage and willingness to act. When she asked him about it, her son said, “She was so little, Mom. She was so scared. They shouldn’t have been doing that.”

That kid’s going to get an extra-special Christmas present this year, Santa told me.

The last two stories are really one story; both are about a NH government employee, who has apparently decided the election has given him free reign to loudly declaim his scary, evil tendencies. The person who told me this story explained that this government employee wields power over the people he was shouting at– they need something from him and can’t get it elsewhere, so they’re afraid to say anything about it or make a complaint. The story is about an everyday court-related program employee, not an immigration authority.

The woman who told me the story was the direct victim of the first attack, and was part of a group who experienced the second. In the first instance, when the woman – who is a beautiful South American woman, a naturalized citizen who has lived in the States – and our state – for nearly 20 years, first attempted to speak to this government employee, he got into her face and shouted: “I SPEAK ENGLISH. YOU UNDERSTAND? WE SPEAK ENGLISH HERE. DON’T TALK IF YOU DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH!”

The woman telling me the story, by the way, speaks beautiful English, with an accent.

The second time she encountered this boor he was shouting at a group that included a mix of people. “NOW WE HAVE TRUMP, THINGS ARE GOING TO CHANGE. IT’S GOING TO BE GREAT – WE [indicating himself, so apparently referring to government employees] ARE ALL GOING TO BE ARMED, SO WE CAN PROTECT OURSELVES [the circumstance and accompanying gesture indicated that the protection was going to be from the motley group requiring this boor’s help in a government program]. WE’LL BE CARRYING GUNS. IT’S GONNA BE A NEW GAME.”

This same woman is having a very, very bad week. She also received a phone call from the lawyer who is helping her bring her (gay) fiancée to the US. “We have to do this quickly, now the election’s over, we may not be able to do it at all if we don’t hurry,” the lawyer told her. “By the way, our fee for this has just doubled.”

You can email me at: taichideb@tds.net.  Please don’t let evil pass unremarked.

By Debra Marshall. Written only for the blog: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

I am one Witness.