Giving Back Through Mobile Meals

It's hard to see by Mobile Meals is on the back window

                             Nelda                                           

            She leans on her cane,

            a mountain of flaccid white flesh

            sagging downward under a worn housecoat

            her feet encased in old blue slippers.

            She smiles and greets me by name.

            I’m one of those who come

            on different days for a few brief moments

            most days we’re her only visitors.

            “Here’s your meal,” I say. “Nice and hot.”

            My cheerful voice tries to erase

            the pain, the loneliness I see on her face today.

Above is the beginning of a poem I wrote about one of my first clients while delivering Mobile Meals. It was from the last time I saw her. No pictures I post with this blog are of any of those I deliver Mobile Meals to. Nelda was a very lonely person in poor health, and rarely did any of her family visitor her. Mostly her only visitors were those who delivered her meals Monday through Friday. She went into a nursing home where I’m sure she was happier with other people around her.

I’ve been a volunteer in one way or another most of my life; a Girl Scout leader for ten years, a den mother for three years, a teacher of CCD at my church off and on through the years, a room mother for my children and a volunteer helper for Head Start briefly. Most of my volunteering came to an end when I started teaching full time, but I always planned on getting back to it when I retired, and I did in the fall of 2006 when I volunteered to deliver Mobile Meals every other Thursday.

Nellie was another one of my first clients, and I had her a long time. We both loved gardening, and she was a bird lover, too. So I spent a little extra time talking with her. In the late summers, she always gave me tomatoes from her garden. I loved Nellie and was so saddened when she was no longer on my route.

Nellie’s Four O’ Clocks

                           I open Nellie’s kitchen door and walk in.

                                  The tiny white haired woman smiles at me.

                                  “I see your Four O’ Clocks are coming up.”

                                  Nellie smiles and says, “It’s about time.

                                  Everything’s late this year.”

                                  I place a hot meal on the table with a

                                  small bagged lunch for later.

                                  “Are you planting a vegetable garden?”

                                  I ask the woman of ninety-three years.

                                  “It’s been too wet to get it plowed.

                                  I’ll probably only plant tomatoes

                                  and beans this year,” she tells me.

                                  “No zinnias? You always have such nice ones.”

                                  She laughs and nods.  “Maybe zinnias.”

                                  “I’m not sure when it’ll ever dry up enough

                                  for me to plant my garden,” I lament.

                                  I leave to continue on my route, smiling

                                  because I’ve grown to love Nellie,

                                  a gardening friend who grows the

                                  Four o’ clocks my mother once grew.

                                  Nellie saves and shares the seeds with me.

                                  The next time I came, she said her son

                                  took over planting her vegetable garden.

                                  She told me he wouldn’t let her advise him

                                  on how to plant tomatoes or beans although

                                  he’d never planted a garden before.

                                  “I guess I’m getting too old and useless.

                                  I don’t know why I’m hanging on,” she said.

                                  I saw her gradually diminish that summer

                                  in size and spirit as her garden filled with weeds

                                  and tomatoes rotted on the vines.

                                  One day she was no longer on my route

                                  I wondered if she’d gone to live with family

                                  or to a nursing home somewhere.

                                  Then the day came when I saw a “For Sale” sign

                                  in her yard just as her Four O’ Clocks bloomed.

Another delightful client was Freda, also in her nineties. A widow, she was quite independent and had a great sense of humor. I was sad when she sunk into dementia and went to a nursing home somewhere. The following poem is about one of my visits to her about five or six months before she was gone.

                                                

                                                             Freda

                       “I see your flowers are still blooming.

                                         I love them,” I said

                                          that November day.

                             Freda looked at me, eyes wide, mouth open

                                         then burst out laughing

                                         and quickly asked

                             “Would you like some cuttings of them?”

                                         She cast an impish look

                                         at the plastic flowers,

                             pink, purple, yellow and red by her porch.

                                         We laughed together

                                          enjoying our joke

                             before I handed her the meals I’d brought

                                         for her and a brother

                                         now sharing a home.

                             Freda, a widow in her mid-nineties,

                                          a small spry woman

                                         with a cheerful smile

                             is one of my favorites on the route.

                                         As I leave I smile

                                         about the flowers,

                             and wonder if Freda, once a farmer’s wife,

                                         misses her gardens

                                         filled with living plants.

Another client I enjoyed immensely was Robert, another client in his nineties, and we shared a love of our small farms, and he was still out cutting wood for his wood stove. One day he took me through his home. It was immaculately clean. He showed me pictures of his lovely wife and his five children’s graduation pictures.  He went into a nursing home, too, but this time I was told where it was, and I visited him there, but I could see it took him a while to remember who I was. His dementia had gotten worse.

        A Visit with Robert

He was waiting for me on his porch when I arrived

You were late yesterday, I couldn’t wait for you.

I had a doctor’s appointment, he said.

I don’t deliver meals on Wednesday. I told him.

He looked a little confused.

I only deliver every other Thursday.

Knowing from past conversations how

he enjoys morning walks in his woods,

I asked if he’d been out walking that morning.

He smiled and said only as far as the burn pile.

I told him I’d walked that morning with my collie.

He asked where I lived, and I told him,

although I’d told him before about my small farm.

He told me again about this house he lived in,

the seventy-two acres he’d bought after WWII

where he and his wife had raised their five children.

how he’d fixed the house, the animals they’d had,

and the vegetable gardens over the years.

Then he told me again about how he’d tried to join

the Navy in World War II and been rejected three times

because of his false front teeth from playing football.

The third time he sneaked into the accepted line

and served in the Navy for three years.

All these stories he’s told me before, but I listened,

nodded and smiled as if each story were new.

Robert is ninety-three years old and lives alone.

He’s told me he gets lonely; rarely sees his children.

I have four more stops to make on my route,

but I figure they won’t starve if I spend a little time

listening to Robert tell me his stories again.

Someday I may be the one telling my stories over and over.

I hope someone will be kind enough to listen to me.

For quite some time now I’ve only had four clients. I had five, but I think she’s in rehabilitation or somewhere. Joyce is in a Do Not Deliver status, so I assume she will be coming back.  She’s a very active woman who almost came running to my car when I arrived.

Maryanne has a black pug that is happy to see me.

Maryanne, was thrilled to find out I was a writer because she wants to write her memoir. She’s been on my route for close to a year now, and hasn’t yet started that memoir although she mentions it now and then. She was thrilled when I gave her a copy of my first book. She has health problems and does a lot of complaining about her kids, is not happy that they talked her into leaving the senior citizen apartment complex where she lived to a trailer home next to her daughter, who apparently rarely visits unless it’s to take her to a doctor’s appointment, or maybe out for groceries. She would love to have me stay and visit for much longer, but I have other meals to deliver. She always says, “God Bless You,” to me when I leave.

My next stop is Patsy. She lives in a trailer park and is even lonelier than Maryanne, because she only has one brother and sister-in-law who live about ten miles away and are busy with their own lives with their grown children and grandchildren. She doesn’t see them often. Patsy has COPD and is connected to an oxygen tank with long tubes snaking throughout her very nice home. She also has a smaller oxygen tank she can carry when she drives someplace. She doesn’t know her neighbors, so when I come, she always asks me to sit down and talk for a while, which I do. We have the same political leanings so she delights in talking about that.

The next one is Audra in her nineties, but still getting around with a walker or cane. Audra has family and friends who visit her. She’s always pleasant, but doesn’t seem to need me to come in and stay awhile.

David is the last one on my route, and one who I’ve had for a long time. He’s so much fun to talk and joke with. He’s three months younger than I am, and lives beneath his son and daughter-in-law’s home in a nice little apartment they’ve made for him. It’s at ground level, and their house is above it. He is mostly in his wheelchair or lying down on his bed/couch in the darkened room where he has his desk and his TV. He spends most of his day watching westerns and other old movies. It was Zorro the last time I was there.  I always deliver the newspaper to him, too, that is delivered to the Mobile Meals site. His parting words are always, “Drive Carefully,” and I always promise I will.

This past week I had a new client which makes five again. She lives in the same trailer park as Patsy does. They’ve never met each other, but both seemed interested in meeting. Donna is only sixty-seven, with diabetes and eye problems. She can’t drive anymore, but can still see to read. Her younger sister was there when I visited, and I guess Donna has other sisters as well as grown children who check on her. She’s short and quite plump, and when I gave her the meal, she immediately took it to the table and started going through it and eating while her sister and I talked. Her sister said she pesters her sister (Donna) to get out and walk, but she won’t walk more than a very short distance before she complains she’s tired.  Both women were friendly.

Years and years ago when one of my sisters was taking a philosophy course, she said there was no such thing as true altruism. When we do good deeds for others, it’s for the positive boost to our own ego. Although I argued with her at the time, maybe she’s right. Not so much as to boost my own ego by impressing others, but by the fact I enjoy these people I meet. I’m pleased that no matter how small my role is, I bring a smile to their faces, and I always leave smiling, too.

And I enjoy visiting with the other volunteers while we wait for our meals to be ready and put in our carriers. There is not one grumpy person among them which says a lot, doesn’t it.

Do you do any volunteer work?

And if you don’t now, have you in the past?