This Presidents’ Day was the first Monday I haven’t been working for quite some time, so I put it to use. My friend, retired R.N. Jacques Angelino, and I made the trip (72 miles each way) down to Mineral in western Athens County. Jacques has made the trip at least 500 times, each time with his Toyota bursting at the seams with clothes, school supplies, personal hygiene items, and food to deliver to the Feed My Sheep food pantry. He always brings his 97-year-old mother Jackie along, and she sits in the Faith Believers’ Ministry sanctuary and bags pasta and rice.
The turnout today was low. We traveled down in the driving rain and low-lying fog and went to work filling food boxes from the shelves that lined the pantry walls. Cans of tuna, corn, Spam, kidney beans, green beans, and soup went into the boxes on the worktable, all the co-workers prayed over them, and then when the cars began lining up outside at 1 p.m., they were ready to go.
Jacques brought 10 lovely afghans from church and gave them to people with young children. Women at the church spent many hours knitting these, and another woman crocheted the separate panels together, and now children in Athens County will sleep in warmth in the near future. He gave one afghan to a woman who turns 85 next week, and I took a picture of it with his one-shot camera. (I was going to bring my new DXG Model 506V mini-camcorder/still camera. I got it at the end of January at the Really, Really Free Market, and it works just fine. Unfortunately, it came minus the CD-ROM with the driver, so I have no way of loading my pictures and video clips into the laptop at present. I sent an email to DXG asking about sending me the disk with the driver.)
He has also made it a point to include a children’s book or two in each outgoing food box. He believes that children should start reading and learning at as young an age as possible, and I totally agree with this. When Jacques taught elementary school in inner-city Washington, D.C., he was constantly appalled during his home visits when he saw the total lack of reading material in any of his pupils’ homes. I live at the other extreme, where books consume every flat surface of my living quarters, but he would go to houses where there was nothing to read–not even a TV Guide or a Holy Bible, let alone a dictionary or a newspaper.
I was home by late afternoon, and the mercury dropped just far enough that the rain turned to wet snow. The ground was already covered by the time I stepped out of the house for my weekly meeting of the Radical Mental Health Collective at Sporeprint.
I do not/will not elaborate on what happens at the meetings, because confidentiality is the first order of business for such a gathering. The only chiseled-in-stone rule of the Collective is a mantra that members of Narcotics Anonymous use as a guide:
Who you see here,
What you hear here,
Let it stay here,
When you leave here.
The reply is: “Hear, hear!”
Glad it sounds like you made it home safe from both your meeting and Athens County.
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