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.