Days Officially Unemployed: 71
This morning I drive out to Vista to attend a Meals on Wheels orientation. Besides volunteering at the homeless shelter, I want to explore other ways to feed the poor, or those in need, and Meals on Wheels seems like it most closely mirrors my job delivering pizza and pasta to the wealthy. About a dozen of us file into a nondescript commercial office building, and the wonderful woman running the place asks for our driver's licenses and proof of insurance for their records.
The majority of the attendees are older, retired people and have come for various reasons: Christian duty; the boredom of retirement; a mother who wants to spend time building her relationship with her daughter by volunteering; people who just want to help other people. When the introductions get around to me, I say, "I've spent the last thirteen years delivering pizza on and off, and I thought it would be more interesting to finally deliver food to people who need it instead of want it." The woman in charge says, "But here you don't get tips," to which I reply, "Sometimes, tips aren't worth it."
The woman in charge runs through the process of delivery and gives us facts, history and statistics, most of which are surprising. Meals on Wheels began 50 years ago when two women realized some of the elderly parishioners weren't making it to church because they were homebound. They wondered how those same people were getting food. And so it began.
I thought it was a free service for low income elderly people, but that's not really the case. The clients pay $7 per day, which gets them a lunch, a dinner, and a drink. It costs Meals on Wheels $14 to provide the food, so they subsidize every client with donated money and fundraising. They will also adjust their fees based on income level, so no one goes hungry.
The meals look like frozen TV dinners from the 1980s, complete with a meat portion, some mashed potatoes or other starch, and vegetables, such as mixed peas, carrots and corn. They provide for specialty diets, such as "low sodium" and "diabetic," but when I ask if they have a vegetarian option, the woman laughs and says, "Maybe in ten to fifteen years, but the generation we're dealing with doesn't have many vegetarians." The average age of their clients is between 80 and 81, everyone is over 60, forty-two percent are over 85, and their oldest client is 103.
Once the logistics and facts are out of the way, stories arise about the clients. There was the man who was such an asshole to the volunteers, they finally had to cut him off. And there was the woman who fell and broke her hip on a Saturday afternoon, lay on the floor all through Sunday and Monday morning, and said she only had hope because she knew her Meals on Wheels volunteer would come Monday at lunchtime (they don't deliver on Sundays but provide those meals with their Saturday deliveries). Then there is the story, and this is when the woman in charge pauses and says she always becomes "becleft" (I think she means verklempt) when she tells the story of the man who cared for his bedridden wife for five years, feeding her every meal they delivered. The woman in charge is now in tears, trying to finish the story. She continues, "He said . . . he said . . . taking care of her was the thing he was most proud of in his life." We're all a little teary eyed now.
When I think of all these stories, I realize this is why I'm here. Like a superhero, I want to feel useful and needed by people; I think we all do in some way, and that's why I was so upset yesterday at the homeless shelter when I felt superfluous. I want to save the woman with the broken hip, calm the man with the bad attitude, and finish my life feeding frozen dinners to the woman I love.
It all reminds me of the scene from J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye when Holden Caulfield describes what he wants to do with his life:
"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around––nobody big, I mean––except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff––I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
It's not so crazy . . .
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