I saw on the caller ID that it was the storage place calling. I figured it was "Jenny" calling again to tell me my rent was late, and to get it in before her bosses made her put my stuff up for auction. It was Jenny, but the call was more serious than needing my late rent. She needed my help.
Jenny, who runs the office at the storage place, is a single mother whose twenty-year old son has disabilities and chronic, severe health problems. Not surprisingly, she has struggled financially.
Some background. I live on the island of Martha's Vineyard, where there are two food pantries: the Island Food Pantry (IFP) at the Methodist "Stone Church," in Vineyard Haven, and the Helping Hand at the First Baptist Church two blocks away. The pantries distribute groceries from November through April, and serve almost exactly the same people. I volunteer at both of them.
Why are there two pantries? I will tell you why (and it is germane to Jenny's situation, sort of). And then we will get back to Jenny's phone call.
The reason that there are two pantries is that the IFP, which has been in existence for 27 years, does not accept donations of "government surplus" food, which is available through the off-island food banks. Why won't they accept this free food? Because of the income-reporting requirements that go along with accepting the federal food. Even though the Island Food Pantry has been running a deficit for 5 years, their board does not want to change the policy. The second pantry was set up in order to gain access to "surplus" food and make it available to hungry people who were not getting, in fact, enough food from the IFP to sustain them anyway.
[aside]
A little about me, by the way: I'm a regular reader, infrequent diarist and commenter, 5 year member of the Great Orange Satan. My last rec'd diary was "Deconstructing Colbert".
My website, wetmachine, features news and analysis of the FCC and related issues; viz, net neutrality, first amendment, media consolidation, etc:
[/aside]
My Dear Wife Betty and I have been IFP volunteers for 15 years, and before that we used to be volunteer drivers for the Meals on Wheels program. On Martha's Vineyard, there is a volunteer group called the Vineyard Committee on Hunger (VCOH), which raises money to support Meals on Wheels, the food pantries, the senior centers, soup kitchens, and various off-island hunger & food related agencies. Dear Wife served as chair of the VCOH for five long years. She was also on the board of the IFP. If you have ever visited Martha's Vineyard, you have probably seen our coin jars at counters of liquor & convenience stores.
It's all the same small band of volunteers who do all these things, of course.
Anyway, when Dear Wife was chair of the VCOH, she thought it was a shame that there was free food to be had through the government surplus program that IFP refused to accept. So she started a second pantry, the Helping Hand, at the Baptist Church.
On the monthly food distribution days, we give out two bags of groceries to everybody who shows up and attests that they meet the income guidelines. Typically, that's about 40 people. Typically our clients get two bags from us and then walk down the street and get two more bags from the IFP. If they make use of both pantries, and virtually all of them do, then they get four bags of groceries each month, per family.
And, three times a year (Thanksgiving, Winter Holidays, Spring Holidays) we give out the fixings for a celebratory meal, including a frozen ham or turkey, apples, carrots, etc). My wife started this program too. The Helping Hand pantry is basically run by my wife and me. Jenny has been one of our clients.
In the past, I have personally delivered groceries to Jenny's house. For about a year and a half she had problems with her leg and could not drive. She got around the office on crutches. She's been ashamed of being so poor despite having a job. But my wife and I are used to that; we see it all the time. So, on food distribution days, after we clean up the Parish House at the Baptist Church, I make like Santa Claus and make deliveries to a few shut-in families that don't have a way to get there.
Jenny called this morning when my wife was still asleep. She sounded upset and scared. She had been up to Boston for medical tests, she told me. (A bad sign. Means the doctors here on the island couldn't handle whatever was wrong.) She has cysts on her liver and ovaries. She's going to have surgery two weeks from now and will be laid up for weeks afterwards. She's going to lose her job. And with it, her health insurance (although presumably, she can then get into one of the Massachusetts plans, I digress). Her only family is her son--who, as I said, has some pretty serious challenges of his own. Jenny wanted to know if I knew anything about Meals on Wheels, Visiting Nurses, etc, etc, etc. She said that she had no idea what she was going to do for money. Her son told her he was going to start a fund raiser, but frankly it's hard to imagine that happening. I told her that I knew some things, but that my wife knew more. I promised I would get back to her.
When Dear Wife woke up, I told her the story.
Now, there's a backstory too.
When you get behind in your rent at the storage place, they put a lock on it and tell you that they're going to auction all your stuff if you don't pay up. This has happened to us many times over the years. My wife and I have been slowly working through our enormous pile of stuff for more than a decade, selling some stuff, giving some stuff away, throwing a lot of stuff out, bringing some stuff home. It's a long story. But we're finally, finally, finally almost done with it. Anyway, I can't tell you how aggravating it is to go over to the storage place on a Saturday morning planning to spend the day working through the pile, only to find an extra lock on your unit. Because your damn rent is late. But only, like, one day late. And the office is closed for the weekend.
So, you go into the office on Monday, and you say, "Here's the rent, Jenny. But did you have to put your goddamn lock on my goddamn unit? Aren't we friends? Couldn't you have left it open for the weekend?" And Jenny says yes, we're friends, but she has to lock my unit, because if her off-island boss finds out that she hasn't, she'll get fired.
The last time this happened, Dear Wife got really pissed. She said, "How many times have we not only given her food, but driven it right to her house and put it right in her kitchen? Well, damn it, never again. I've had it with doing favors for that woman if she can't even cut me a three-day courtesy. I'm never doing another favor for her."
So that was the context when I told Dear Wife about Jenny's new situation.
"OK, OK," my wife said. "Please tell Jenny that I'm going to drive over to Community Services and see what I can get going for her." And she got dressed and drove over to Community Services to see what she could get going. And then she went to work.
And of course, we'll give her food. We have the keys to the pantry, which is full nearly to overflowing since the stores have been building up all summer and the first distribution won't be until 6 weeks from now. When situations like this come up, we just take food on our own authority and give it where it needs to go. After all, we organize the delivery of the food, stack it in the store room, clean the store room, maintain the freezer & refrigerator, do the paperwork, publicize the monthly distributions, prepare 80 bags of groceries every month, distribute them to a sometimes unruly crowd. Sometimes we have other volunteers to help us, but mainly it's just my wife and me. Frankly, running this pantry is a giant, unending, constant, irritating pain in the ass. (Not to mention that we still volunteer at the other pantry too.) So I figure we're entitled, even though we're technically breaking some goddamn rule or other.
This is how we take care of each other down at the lower end of the food chain.
(Many people, by the way, have the misconception that Martha's Vineyard has no poor people. They are wrong. They laugh at the idea of food pantries here. They are heartless. Who are clients? Old people who have lived here all their lives. People with severe mental health issues. Recent immigrants, mostly from Brazil, who clean the rich peoples' toilets in the summer & mow their lawns. Working poor like Jenny. And yes, a few down-and-out alcoholics.)
And now Hank Paulson wants $700,000,000,000.00 to give to his friends. He says that asking them to forgo their multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses is a "poison pill." We can't have that, he says. Congress must give him a blank check. There is no money to help Jenny or her son with their medical situations, of course. That would be fiscally irresponsible. But ten, fifteen, twenty, forty million dollars --each!-- for the wizards of Wall Street? Sure, no problemo! That's essential to draw top talent needed to run these firms that keep the world humming. It's beyond infuriating. It turns one's thoughts to revolution, it does.
I have to tell you, my own situation is not far from Jenny's. I'm pretty damn close to getting foreclosed on myself. Ever since I dragged my family into poverty in the name of my art 12 years ago, we've been slowly, slowly, slowly climbing out. After seven years of vagabondage and homelessness, we finally managed to buy our own home again 5 years ago (I'm 55 years old). It's a tiny house, but it wasn't cheap. And I'm sure we're under water (owe more than we could sell it for.) My wife is a librarian, and, since having been laid off last November, I'm a partially-employed freelance writer. We don't make enough money. We didn't even before I got laid off.
This is America today.
By the way, if you would like to help out "Jenny", leave a note in the comments, and I'll let you know if a fund gets set up. Anybody who lives on Martha's Vineyard can easily enough figure out her real name, by the way, but I know she wouldn't mind my making public her situation. As she said, she'll take whatever help she can get.
If you would like to help out me, by the way, -- you can do that quite easily by buying one of my books! Here's some blather about them, for any of y'all as have read this far. (Maybe it's unseemly to piggyback on Jenny's sad story, but hey, we're all friends here, right?)
My "Acts of the Apostles" is a thriller about nanomachines, neurobiology, Gulf War Syndrome, and a Silicon Valley messiah. My "Cheap Complex Devices" purports to be a report of the first "Hofstadter Prize for Machine-Written Narrative", but really is kind of a metafictiony meditation on awareness (human, machine, other) and a lampoon of academic artificial intelligence. And the mostly-finished illustrated novella "The Pains" is a fable about a young seminarian afflicted with a kind of stigmata, set in a world that is part Orwell's 1984, part Reagan's 1984, and part of my own fevered invention. Acts of the Apostles, by the way, which came out in 1999, among other things correctly predicted a second war in Iraq.
All three of these books are available for FREE download from my site wetmachine. "Acts" and "CCD" are available for purchase (paypal or check) in paper codex (i.e. printed book) from from my site and also from Amazon (here and here; The Pains is available for pre-order from wetmachine. I am the publisher. My books are kind of minor cult hits among geeks, but reviews are stale and they've fallen off the radar. If you buy through my site, I'll autograph however you like, such a deal!
There are lots of reviews of the books out there, but they're pretty old.
For example, here's what Salon had to say about Acts:
http://archive.salon.com/...
and here's what Kuro5hin had to say about CCD:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/...
By the way, for futher bonafides, here are some articles I wrote for Salon a while back:
"How I Decoded the Human Genome":
http://dir.salon.com/...
http://dir.salon.com/...
"How I Destroyed the New Economy"
http://dir.salon.com/...
Artificial Stupidity:
http://dir.salon.com/...
http://archive.salon.com/...
OK, the end.
But a footnote, hooray, I just found out that my application to become a volunteer fireman in Tisbury has been accepted & I've been assigned to the ladder truck. Sunday I'm to go down to the station and collect my equipment and meet all the guys. I'm feeling so goddamned community-dedicated, I could just spit. Too bad Paulson won't give me twenty million dollars for being such a nice guy.
And a final, final, thought. As required by the federal government, at our Helping Hand food distributions, we duly note the name, address, household income, and number of members for each recipient. Each recipient must sign in for himself or herself. We keep these signup sheets in a notebook, which is left in the storeroom. Every year or we get inspected to make sure that the food is stored safely, etc, and that we're keeping proper records. The food bank inspector person flips through our notebook, page after page in shaky handwriting of people's justifications for accepting their "bailout" of 2 bags of groceries. I wonder, will Paulson's friends have to wait on line and fill out a form with their names and addresses and household incomes before they can bet their millions?