Who is Helping Who Here?

I debated about buying wheat bread but only for five seconds. It’s not for me to decide that somebody getting a bag lunch ought to eat healthier, so I bought five loaves of white bread, sturdy white bread, bread that could hold up to a very thick slather of peanut butter and a small but impressive mound of jelly.

My PBJ’s are not lightweights in the sandwich world. Ever since my husband walked by several months ago and noted that the spread seemed a bit sparing, I’ve doubled, tripled the peanut butter. You can’t make the peanut butter stretch, I realized. You have to buy more peanut butter.

No to the stretch mentality.

In addition to PBJ, each of my fifty bag lunches had string cheese, chips, and cookies. I won’t win the healthy bag lunch prize, but it’s a lunch I’d eat happily especially with a glass of milk. Plus, none of this stuff goes bad or gets wonky if it freezes which it might tonight as the weather people flutter about warning us about the ‘massive cold front’ headed this way.

Fifty lunches to Street Angels. I hope they’re going to people ensconced in warming rooms tonight but know that some or all may be given to people still outside. There are those folks who just can’t bring themselves to go inside. In my early days volunteering with Street Angels, there was a man who lived the whole winter under several feet of blankets in a tent just off a major street. He’d reach his hand out to take a hot meal (and a bag lunch) and whatever other supplies he needed. Eventually, after several years, he came out of his tent and got into housing. He lived through it, not everybody does.

I am coming out of my funk somewhat. Making the lunches helped. Tomorrow I’m going with my younger son to volunteer at a meal program. There will be a lot of physical work, chopping and stirring, wiping tables, setting up chairs, dishing up whatever it is on to a hundred plates, and then cleaning up, mopping, a lot of easy camaraderie about the weather and the food. People walking in the door with their hands in their pockets to wait in line for a hot dinner. It’s a sad situation made warm by food and regard.

That’s uplifting all by itself. That’s what the moment offers and I’m taking it.