It is Saturday morning and I was up before 5AM; short of a dog, my best friend at the time is a cup of good coffee and the gradient of the sky to the east. I chose this apartment because all of the windows faced that way and I’m a big sunrise type of guy. More about the apartment in part 2.
A couple things I started in on right after arriving here: find a good 12 Step meeting and find a good church. I got lucky with both on the first go. I’ve been attending Sunday worship and Tuesday night men’s Bible study and though everyone was very nice and inviting I found myself still feeling alone. The relationship of coworkers falls in its own class and rarely intersects friendships.
So on a morning walk I was praying that I wanted to expand my life past work+apartment. Service work! That evening a community bulletin came in the mail and there was a section on volunteering. I excitedly read through it but nothing appealed to my heart.
Food
So I engaged in the old fallback: Meals on Wheels. I had volunteered for that organization previously in Prescott and in Boulder before that and found it rewarding. How often do you get to cook from a book titled Food for Fifty, cut up 140 carrots or peel 144 hardboiled eggs? And all before dawn? There was a local effort attached to the community center and a few emails later I was on the schedule for Friday morning, 6AM.
If you are unfamiliar, MoW is a nationwide effort of paid workers and volunteers to prepare meals for the homebound, which are mostly seniors. To qualify as a recipient you simply ask. Back in Boulder if you were discharged from the hospital after surgery you were automatically signed up for a 3+ weeks of food delivery to aid in your recovery.
It may sound surprising at first but feeding people is a minor component of the program: it is the human interaction that clients look forward to on a daily basis so much more. Many of the volunteers who deliver the meals (separate from those who work in the kitchen preparing them and planning the routes) have the harder job: they are observers for the wellbeing of the clients. Many go on to form friendships and engage in further acts of service to help like minor home repairs, yardwork, etc. But really just conversation, a kind smile and feeling remembered is the currency of the day.
Back in Boulder there was a young mom with two grade school kids with red hair who accompanied her on the delivery route. Those polite but animated kids brought infinite joy to the people they visited. I always marveled at the impact that family had and I was glad to be in the background supporting it.
One thing that I have learned about serving as a volunteer is that you arrive without any expectations other than a sharp mindset anchored on serving. The correct answer to most every form of direction, even when my engineer brain thinks “that is just not optimal” is instead “yes ma’am/sir.” As I was told many years ago, “People don’t care what you know until they know you care.”
Back to Round Rock
I was placed in charge of bagging food for the 3-day weekend, assembly line style. It took the shift lead about 4.2 seconds to realize I was fairly fire-and-forget; just tell me what you want as the end product and turn me loose.
I had not served at MoW for a number of years and I was surprised that one thing they included in the meal bags: shelf stabilized milk. I have written about this before here on the blog but as you can see in the photo above it also comes in single servings. A self reliance dream! (As soon as I find a source I’ll post it.)
I also realized that most of the items I was bagging barely qualified as “food” to be honest – a lot was sugar stabilized with chemicals in some form of colloidal milieu. I’ll give a pass to the foil packs of tuna from Starkist which are also a great thing to have in your 72 hour bag and on the shelf. (Basically anything is that comes in a small serving and is good for 12-18 months that you don’t really need to cook or heat. Bonus points for it being real animal protien instead of TVP as well.)
The final outcome of 2.5 hours of directed effort was about 85 of these bags of food to tide clients over through the extended weekend:
It was a great way to start my Friday. I even got to wear my favorite apron, the first time in many years!
More in part 2.
Dan