On the island of Martha's Vineyard, where I reside, there are two food pantries that give away groceries during the cold months. The Island Food Pantry operates out of the basement of Methodist ("stone") Church in Vineyard Haven; the Serving Hands pantry, which was founded and is directed by my wife Betty Burton, operates out of the First Baptist church two blocks away. My wife and I volunteer at both pantries ( & we basically run Servings Hands ourselves). Yesterday was very busy. We gave the "Christmas Special" --two bags of groceries containing, among other things, all the fixings for a traditional turkey dinner, including the turkey-- to 113 people.
You may find interesting the "family-to-family" concept, also pioneered by Betty, whereby the the turkey dinners are paid for by $25 donations from other islanders.
The Serving Hands Pantry
Most people still call this service the "Surplus Food Program", which is the name we ourselves used for several years, because the majority of the food that we distribute comes from the U.S. government by way of the Greater Boston Food bank, and the government calls it "surplus food". Our pantry has a small storeroom at the back of the First Baptist parish house--a building adjacent to the church which the church uses for its own social functions and rents out to other groups for their functions. The building itself is a two-story affair, the first floor of which is a kind of hall of perhaps 250 square feet that has a kitchen and a few bathrooms in addition to an L shaped open area and our storeroom. Rickety folding doors divide the L hall into a smaller, narrower section and bigger square area. Our storeroom has a freezer, a refrigerator and stacks of canned and dry goods. It's about the size of a small office.
Once a month, typically on a Thursday, a shipment of food arrives at our pantry. (More about this below.) On the next day we distribute most or all of it, putting any undistributed food into our storeroom. We never know what's going to be in the shipment. It typically includes things like rice, canned peaches, tuna, peanut butter, spaghetti sauce, and frozen chickens; and it sometimes includes exotic things like disposable razors or dried apricots. Some of the products we get have familiar brand names; some have obscure brand names; and some of them come with soviet-style USDA generic "food" labels, for example USDA RICE. The monthly shipments to us come year-round, but we only make disbursements in the cold months. Thus we build up our stocks over the summer and deplete them over the winter. By spring our storeroom is generally empty.
The Baptist church provides the small storeroom to us free of charge and also allows us to use the larger hall for our monthly distributions rent free. The hall & kitchen are also used, variously, by a kiddie music program, by Alcoholics Anonymous, by the First Baptist Women's Auxiliary, and by one or two other groups. Our "Serving Hands" pantry is not affiliated with the church; we just use their space. Other groups, whether they're associated with the church or unaffiliated cash-paying customers, sometimes need to use the hall when we do. This leads to some interesting tensions.
Although we're supposed to be told in advance when the food is to arrive (so that I can be there and put it away), the people who deliver it are generally unreliable (see below) about notifying us. If, say, a food shipment is supposed to arrive at the parish house at 9:00 AM on Thursday morning, I'm as likely as not to find a message on my phone from Lynn T. of the women's group on the preceding Wednesday night: "They made a delivery today and the kitchen is full of your food. It looks like there's a lot of frozen chickens here that are thawing, and also a couple hundred dozen eggs. I hope you can come move it soon, because we're supposed to have a parish committee meeting there about an hour from now. . ."
In other words, our pantry's food, instead of being nicely put away in the donated space at the back of the building, is clogging up the entire kitchen and getting in everybody's way, and furthermore, stuff that needs to be kept frozen is melting. When this situation arises, somebody has to get to the church right away and move all that food that is in the kitchen into the back room. That somebody is me.
Family to Family
"Family to family" is a program invented by Betty. It's a simple and effective fundraising appeal: your family donates $25 to family-to-family program, and we give another family a turkey dinner on your behalf. Reliable Market, in Oak Bluffs, provides the food at a deep discount. They're actually probably subsidizing the program.
We've been doing it for six years now. The first couple of years, we did it at Thanksgiving. Then we expanded to Thanksgiving and Christmastime. And last year we added a third meal in the spring.
We advertise at the Island Food Pantry, and we put notices in the two newspapers. The first time we did it, we had enough supplies for something like 30 families, and something like 40 families showed up, so we had to tell the last ten families, "sorry, we ran out." For several years we consistently underestimated how many people would show up on distribution day, because the word began to spread, and the economy worsened, and the number of people coming increased faster than our (increasing) estimates. Lately we've gotten better at estimating: 100 at Thanksgiving, 120 in December 100 in the spring.
Flashback: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday
Last Sunday night I got a call from my twenty year old daughter. "I had an accident. I rolled Alice's car in the Adirondacks. It was snowing. I hit ice."
"Are you OK?"
"I think so. An ambulance is coming."
"Is anybody else hurt?"
"No, I was alone."
"Where are you now?"
"A man stopped to help me. I'm at his house."
"Get yourself checked out. You might have internal injuries. Call us from the hospital."
She had been visiting her boyfriend, who goes to Holy Cross, about a five-hour drive away from where she goes to school.
It was almost too late to catch the last ferry off-island, and neither of our cars is ready for a long trip. Betty and I decided to wait for the first boat in the morning and rent a car on the other side.
A few hours later we got a call from her at the Glens Falls hospital. No major damage, but lots and lots of severe bruising. Thanks to some kind and industrious people Amanda's House exists. Our daughter would stay there until we arrived.
We caught the first boat the next morning, and after a short bus ride and some micky-mousing around getting the rental car we we were on our way. We got to Amanda's house in the middle of the afternoon. Our daughter burst into tears when she saw us and sobbed in my wife's arms for ten minutes. She was covered with bruises--on her face, her knees, the Sam Browne lines of the seat belt. . .
She is a brave young woman who has seen much more than her share of trouble in her life. She already had some symptoms of PTSD, and this experience was not going to help in that department. And, she had bronchitis. This accident seemed like gratuitous piling on by the Universe. But at least she was OK.
As the sun set, we left Amanda's House and headed for daughter's college on the far side of the Adirondack Park. Along the way we stopped at the salvage yard to see the car & collect some of her things at the place it had been towed to. The car was a crumpled mess, with broken glass all around. It was a site I'm not likely to forget.
As we drove through the dark forest, we got more of the story from her: she had gone too fast around a curve. The car spun around several times and flipped over, landing upside down in a snow bank with the hood and front doors blocked by snow. The engine was still running. She turned the car off, unfastened her seat belt and fell on her head. But with the key out of the ignition, the doors would not open, and she could not see to put the key back in. Somehow she kicked open a back door. There was a house--a trailer, actually--nearby. She ran to it, and found a scene out of "Deliverance". The woman who answered the door said she would call a tow truck, but not the police. She didn't invite her in. She called to her son to come help, but he refused to come out of his room. About then my daughter realized she was barefoot. He shoes had come off in the wreck. Thank God, a good Samaritan came to Daughter's rescue. A local school teacher, he had seen the car, broken open the back window to see if anybody was trapped inside, followed Daughter to the trailer. . .
It doesn't do to think about these things too much. There is no cell phone service in the Adirondacks. The park is bigger than Wales and has only a handful of people living in it. It's a virtual wilderness. It was four degrees below zero. . . No, don't think about it.
We crossed the forrest and got to the hotel late that night. On Tuesday, Betty went with daughter to the medical center while I met with the dean of students to let him know what was going on. Then we drove around getting prescriptions filled and buying heating pads and such. A snowstorm was beginning. We said goodbye to our poor battered child and headed home, arriving in Falmouth too late for the last ferry. We got a room at the Holiday Inn, paying the special "Stranded Vineyarders" rate.
Wednesday morning Betty took the bus up to Boston. Ever since she slipped and fell into a tree last November, she has been complaining about pain in her shoulder. X-rays are evidently OK, so now she's going for an MRI. . .
I return the rental car & head for the boat. It's stormy; high winds, big waves. Some talk of canceling the ferry until conditions improve. I get on board, we head out of the slip. The waves are so big that the captain takes the long way home, sailing far up the chop, nearly to Cuttyhunk, then U-turns and surfs the boat towards the harbor. . .
I get home to a million messages on the answering machine, a cold house--we've run out of propane--a bunch of urgent errands to run, propane to order. Plus, I've been trying like hell to finish up the last details on getting this book to the printer. Betty calls from Boston. Guess what? She's got a broken shoulder. It's been broken for a month. No wonder she's been in pain. Ibuprofen doesn't do much for broken bones. . . She's on the 5:00 PM bus out of Boston, which will put her on the 7:30 boat, arriving at 8:15.
While I'm talking to Betty, a message gets left on my voicemail. A message from Lynn Tuck of the Baptist Women's group. "They made a delivery today and the kitchen is full of your food. It looks like there's a lot of frozen chickens here that are thawing, and also a couple hundred dozen eggs. I hope you can come move it soon. . ."
OK, OK. Looks like I'm not going to get that book finished this afternoon. I drive down to the Baptist church. Damn! What am I going to do with 30 frozen chickens and sixty dozen eggs? Our storeroom freezer and fridge are already full, and 120 turkeys will be here in two days. Fortunately I have a key to the other pantry, the one at the Stone Church, and I happen to know that their freezer and refrigerator are empty. I could ask somebody for permission to store our stuff there, but "to ask permission is to seek denial." I decide to just cram the stuff there; if anybody objects I'll worry about it then. Two and a half hours later, everything has been moved, just in time for me to meet Betty walking off the boat. . .
Thursday
Betty goes to work at the library, I work on my books. Jeffrey Zeldman's nice blog posting helps me sell a few copies.
Friday, Turkey distribution day
I arrive at the Parish House at 8:15 AM and begin setting up tables end-to-end in the long portion of the L. I open the storeroom and get out a stack of paper bags. At 8:15 Brian K. of the Dukes Country Sherrif's Department shows up with 8 or so parolees sentenced to "community service". I show them how to fill a bag with canned goods and dry goods from store room, and tell them to make 120 more just like it. Then I set up the tables in the big room, take one of the guys with me and drive two blocks down to the other pantry to collect the eggs. This first part of the setup takes until 10:00 AM. Betty is at home, resting her shoulder. From 10:00 AM til noon, I get breakfast and try to take care of some book stuff.
At noon, Betty and I are back at the Parish House. A bunch of our volunteers have arrived. For some of them, this is their first exposure to one of our distributions. I call a brief meeting and tell them how it's going to work. Five minutes later, right on schedule, the delivery truck from Reliable Market shows up with 120 frozen turkeys, 120 bags of apples, 120 bags of carrots, stuffing, canned gravy, stuffing mix, onions, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie mix, butternut squash. . .
The distribution is scheduled from 2:00 PM til 4:00 PM. "They'll start lining up at around 1:15" I tell the volunteers. I show them how to make a turkey-fixins bag & set up the assembly line. We've got two hours to make 120 bagsfull.
We've asked the police with some help with crowd control. Tim S. the officer on duty, tells Betty that we're giving free food to people who don't need it, freeloaders. . . we get that attitude from time to time. But the policewoman that they send to direct traffic around the church seems more enlightened.
Nine volunteers have shown up to help us prepare and distribute today's package. Some of these volunteers are also clients of the pantry; they'll work for a few hours, then take their food. Others are well-to-do and don't qualify for the distribution. Nine is almost too many people for me and Betty to manage, especially since one of them is apparently drunk, two of them are extremely bossy, and a fourth doesn't listen to a thing you say. But everybody is put to good use. We're ready to go by 1 PM, an hour ahead of schedule.
This puts us in a quandary: the clients have begun lining up outside the front door. If we let them in early, then next month they'll come earlier still-- we have a lot of repeat customers, and some of them are a chronic pain in the ass, obsessed with being first in line. And what if we run out of food? We announced that the distribution would take place from 2 until 4. If we open the doors at 1:20 and run out of food by 3 PM, what do we say to the people who arrive at 3:15?
By 1:30 there are about 25 people lined up outside the door. It's not very cold out, and the skies have cleared. So we don't feel too bad about leaving them out in the cold. But a lot of our clients are old or sick -- the woman who is first in line tells me that she's had two open heart surgeries in the last 9 months. "First they put in a metal valve but that didn't take and I was worse than before. So they opened me up and put in a cow valve." When you run a free food operation, sometimes you get more information than you want. It's kind of pointless to keep them waiting. We decide to start the distribution at 1:30.
The process is simple: you enter the hall by the front door, proceed to the table where Betty is sitting, answer a few questions, and sign in. You choose to take either a dozen eggs or a pound of cheese, then proceed to Station A, where you collect one bag of "government surplus" canned and dry goods, then you make a wide U-turn and proceed to Station B, where you collect a bag of turkey fixins. Proceed to station C, where the turkeys are handed out, and there is a giant supply of island-grown organic potatoes and squash from which you can help yourself. Then you exit by the side door. A well-designed traffic flow.
That's a lot of food, about forty pounds's worth. Most of our clients are not able to carry all that, so we volunteers shuttle back and forth between the hall and the cars. But several of our clients have collapsable carts that can easily hold two bags of groceries and a turkey.
We've seen a lot of these clients before. Dozens of women older than 65; a dozen or more young mothers with children in tow; people with well-known mental health problems who reside in group homes; people in wheel chairs and walkers. About 20% are Brazilian immigrants, some with very little or no English. Some first-time clients are clearly embarrassed and humiliated to be accepting a handout; long-time clients just say "thanks, see you next time."
I helped about 20 people to their cars, which were of all kinds but generally old, cluttered, and falling apart. Poor people's cars, in other words.
There was a big crush of people for about an hour with the line out the door, and then there was a lull. Nobody but volunteers in the hall. Betty came over to me with a look of mild distress.
"Please remind me that there was a pause like this at Thanksgiving?"
I knew what she was thinking: What if nobody esle comes? What would we do with dozens and dozens of frozen turkeys? Where would we put them? Our freezer was full, the Island Food Pantry's freezers where full. We would have to load the excess turkeys in our car and take them-- where, exactly? Well, we would figure that out later, if neccessary. Meanwhile all we had to do was get within 15 turkeys of "all gone." The minister would take the rest, if necessary, and deliver them to needy families of the Tribe up in Aquinnah.
"Yes, there was a lull like this," I said. "There always is. Anyway, the lull is over."
There was a group of about ten people coming through the door. And ten more after them.
During breaks in the action we set aside a bunch of allotments for some shut-ins that Betty and I deliver to, and that made the pile smaller. As tables that had held bags of food became clear, I folded them in put them away. All parts of the hall were becoming more open. Roger, the minister, came by. "Seems like you're not having such a turnout today," he said. I told him that actually we were on track to serve twenty people more than we had served at Thanksgiving. "I'm not seeing as many people crossing my yard and or cars blocking the street. Normally it's a big mess on Turkey days."
We were serving more people but causing less congestion. That's because there was a policewoman in a big orange coat keeping the people moving, and there were six more volunteers than usual carrying loads to cars. After six years, we had finally gotten our act together.
Around 3PM the church ladies began arriving, eager to start decorating the hall for their annual Christmas Tea. Most of the ladies did not seem happy to see us. "We thought we would miss you this year," one lady said to me. "Whenever we change our dates, you do too." Although we had been folding boxes and collecting random plastic wrap and paper as we went along, still the room looked a mess, with lots of random packaging all about and oak leaves that had flown in the open doors onto the floor. Vacuum cleaners started up. "Looks like we're getting the bum's rush," I said to Betty.
By 3:30 we were out of there, after having given Roger five or six Turkey packages, put our stuff away, loaded our packages for shut-ins into our car along with a hundred pounds of island-grown potatoes that had found no takers. We left our phone number with the Church Ladies to be given to any stragglers, then drove over to the Stone Church, where Lynn and Judy and Catherine were wrapping up from their own distribution. As I entered their storeroom, Judy was preparing an order form. "Looks like we're out of potatoes," she said. "Hope we can get some by Monday." "Ask and it shall be answered," I said, and put the first of four crates on a table.
I drove Betty home; her neck and shoulder were killing her. Then I made my usual delivery to B.J., who has emphysema and is tethered to an oxygen tank. She spends hours and hours watching television, mostly college sports and Judge Judy. "Hey, Purdue's doing great this year. Gonna be something," she said as I deposited a ton of food on her kitchen counter. She knows that my wife and I went to Purdue, so she follows their teams for us, since we don't have TV in our house. Then I drove to S.J.'s house. S has had some terrible health problems. The house was dark, but there was a note on the door asking me to put the food in the cab of her pickup truck for her son to retrieve later.
One or two deliveries after that, I was done. So I drove to Your Market and picked up a sixpack. What a week.
That's great, but where do you get the time? Don't you guys have jobs?
Betty's a librarian at the Vineyard Haven Public Library. She runs "adult programming" which means the evening lecture series and classes, and she's also the bookkeeper --financial books, that is. Usually she works Monday through Thursday. Having a broken shoulder and a daughter in a very nasty car wreck kind of cut into her schedule.
I'm an underemployed freelance technical writer. I've worked about half-time this year. Work has been just evaporating. Promised assignments gets pushed further and further into the future, and then they just disappear. And our financial situation is very, very scary. Believe me, I would rather have been working this week than driving up to Canada and bagging groceries. But what are you gonna do? My daughter's car DID flip over, my wife's shoulder IS broken, and the turkeys were not going to distribute themselves. But I need to make money somehow, so please excuse this brief commercial announcement:
I'm also a novelist and essayist, and I make a few bucks selling books through my website. These are very good books. You should check them out -- they're on my site for free download:
I write mostly about technology and the people who swear by it. Since 1980, I've worked for computer & software companies in and around Silicon Valley and in the Boston area. I've also been a truck driver, construction laborer, warehouseman, working class hero and self-publishing factotum.
My novel Acts of the Apostles is a technoparanoid cyberthriller about nanomachines, neurobiology, Gulf War Syndrome and a Silicon Valley messiah. Here's a link to some reviews. Cheap Complex Devices is a metafictiony meditation on self-awareness (human, machine, other) that's also a lampoon of academic artificial intelligence in the spirit of Nabokov's Pale Fire. An insightful (and glowing!) review of it can be found here. The Pains is a tale of faith in a world that appears to be falling apart. It tells the story of Norman Lux, a 24-year-old novitiate in a religious order, who becomes afflicted with something akin to stigmata. It's illustrated by Cheeseburger Brown.
For Salon.com I wrote How I Destroyed the New Economy, about my part in desecrating a sacred spot and how that caused the dot com bubble to burst; How I Decoded the Human Genome, about my short-circuited career as a moral philosopher, and Artificial Stupidity, about the eccentric hedonist Hugh Loebner's run in with the eminence grises of respectable computer science. All of my stories for Salon have made the Editor's Choice year-end list, but that didn't prevent me from getting snubbed at a big Salon writer's shindig.
Footnote: Why two pantries?
Now you may be wondering, why does Martha's Vineyard have two pantries a quarter of a mile apart that serve the same clients and are staffed by the same volunteers?
Here's why. Betty was, for five years, chairperson of the Vineyard Committee on Hunger, which is a group that raises money for the food pantries, senior centers, meals-on-wheels, and similar programs both on and off the island. She was concerned that the Island Food Pantry's policies (two bags of groceries per family every two weeks) were leaving people hungry, even those who had food stamps--and many of our clients don't.
At the same time, she discovered that there was free food available from the Greater Boston Food bank, most of it donated as "surplus" food from the U.S. Government. Food from this bank was already being accepted by the various senior centers on the island; the public works departments of the various island towns took turns once a month sending a dump truck on the boat & driving to Hyannis to pick up the food. The management of the Island Food Pantry (which operates three days a week from November thru April) declined to take any of this food, because it came with certain strings attached -- we're required to collect information about the recipients -- such as income, size of household, and number of seniors and children in the home. Since the Island Food Pantry didn't want the free food, Betty started up the Suplus Food Distribution as a once-a month supplement.
A few years later she started the "Family to Family" program because she knew that poor families often missed out on fancy holiday meals because they had no money and were limited to whatever food they had on hand. But poor families like Turkey on Thanksgiving like everybody else, so Betty decided to remedy the situation and give donors a chance to make a more personal connection to their neighbors.