In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. . . .
The third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world. . . .
Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.
~ President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, January 6, 1941
THE NEXT DIARY IN THE SERIES HAS BEEN POSTED.
That Norman Rockwell illustration (from 1943) could easily have been drawn in my Vermont grandparents’ dining room on any Thanksgiving when my mother was a teenager. My Nana had numerous aprons just like the one pictured there, and my grandfather had white hair and a warm countenance. I spent a great deal of time on their farm when I was growing up, and I adored them both.
I have had an economically privileged life. I have never known hunger. I have never experienced a dinner like that described by Meteor Blades in the Valentines’ Day Feeding America series, last February:
I was 6 years old and sitting next to my grandmother at the table where as many as 14 of our extended family members ate our evening meals. I quickly finished my small plate of rice and beans, and said, "But, grandma, I’m still hungry." Everyone went silent. My grandma, Simmalikee, smiled at me, took her plate and scraped off the several spoonfuls she had not yet eaten onto mine. No, I thought. Not your food, grandma. Some other food. I sobbed as she coaxed me to eat each bite. No matter how empty my belly felt, I never again said I was still hungry after a meal. That was a long time ago, and my grandma has been dead more than 50 years, but I have never forgotten that terrible moment nor what it means to be poor. If there was meat or fish on the table then, it was possum, deer, catfish and the occasional wild hog. In those days, before food stamps, we received surplus government hand-outs every month: rice, beans, cornmeal, lard, cheese and powdered milk. It was never enough, and toward the end of each month, everybody’s portions got smaller.
Going Hungry in the 'Richest Country in the World'
I have never known hunger; but 49 million Americans are facing hunger right now.
If you donate here, Proctor and Gamble will match you.
I have never known hunger; but my Vermont grandmother’s mother absolutely did.
She was born in a slum in Liverpool, England in, well we think it was 1875. We will never know for sure (and neither did she), because the official records she brought with her to Canada some five or so years later (if there ever were any) were lost in a fire in the early 20th century. All we know is that her early days were a coal-smudged Dickensian nightmare.
My great-grandmother did not come willingly to the Western Hemisphere, though. Nor did she come with her parents. She came with her seven-year-old sister, on an "orphan" ship ~ but she was not an orphan. She and her sister had been handed over by their parents, who were too poor to feed them. Whether those parents knew what was in store for her or her sister, I do not know. Nor did any of us know much about the wretched life she had lived in Canada until a few years ago, when my Aunt found someone who had researched the orphan ship and discovered heartbreaking stories. These were things my great-grandmother had never told anyone.
Upon her arrival in Canada, my great-grandmother, who was tiny even as a grown woman, became, more-or-less, an indentured servant to a Canadian farming couple. She was mistreated from the start. When you are so small and hungry, you have no say in the matter.
At 16 ot 17 or so, she married a handsome Brit, and quickly had three children. He then deserted her, and my great-grandmother worked as a janitress in small towns in Vermont to support my grandmother and her two brothers.
Perhaps in reaction the grind of her daily life, my great-grandmother developed a love for the beautiful and delicate. She hand-stitched intricate quilts from tiny squares of cast-off cloth. She made lace. She collected, with money that probably should have gone for more practical things, hundreds of stereographs of exotic places (the Pyramids, Paris, the Colisseum) that she would never visit. She loved small cookies (made from scratch) and grew gorgeous purple Dahlias, the bulbs from which she carefully extracted from her pocket-sized garden each fall and cooled in the winter months in dirt-filled cans in her cellar.
On the mantle in the parlor of the three-room flat in which she lived when I knew her (one of four in a multiple-family home, next to a filling station, which had linoleum floors, a hand-wringer in the kitchen and a party-line ~ and a delight of Dahlias next to the porch) she kept five china cups and saucers, each painted with a different floral design. They were the only things in her lavender-scented little home that I was never allowed to touch. They were not fancy china, but she had scrimped and saved to buy them, and they were one of the few things in her life that had never been broken.
Grammy Great was 96 years old when she died in April 1971. This diary is for her.
No child in America should go to sleep, as she did on so many occasions, hungry. No parent in America should worry, as she did on so many occasions, about where the next meal for her children would come. And everyone deserves a life that is not broken ~ and a china cup and saucer.
Forty-nine million Americans are hungry. We cannot grant every American freedom from hunger, freedom from want today, but we can give so many of them at least one day of Thanksgiving.
I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do.
~ Helen Keller
If you donate here, Proctor and Gamble will match you.
I will donate .50 per rec and another .50 per comment. Thank you, Grammy Great. I loved you so much.
WOW! Series organizer rb137 is kicking in another .10 per rec! Thank you!
SSMir has pledged .25 per rec and .10 per comment! Thank you! Thank you!
Series diarist blue jersey mom is donating .10 per rec! Thank you! Thank you!
kath25 has $50 burning a hole in her pocket and is looking for a matching donation!
Because of economies of scale and corporate donations, every dollar raised by Feeding America this week provides fourteen meals for hungry Americans.
Special thanks to rb137 for organizing this incredible effort this weekend. And special thanks to this wonderful community for supporting it.
Please keep reading and recommending this amazing series:
Saturday, Nov 21 (all times EST):
11:00a -- blue jersey mom
2:00p -- Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse
5:00p -- buhdydharma
8:00p -- JayinPortland
11:00p -- rb137
Sunday, Nov 22 (all times EST):
11:00a -- noweasels
2:00p -- TheFatLadySings
5:00p -- Timroff
8:00p -- teacherken
11:00p -- boatsie