GIVING BACK BY DELIVERING MOBILE MEALS

Not Robert but looks like I remember him.

       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.

 Robert is no longer getting Mobile Meals. His sons put him in a nursing home. I haven’t read his obituary so I assume he’s still alive.

These are not my Girl Scouts. I couldn't find their pictures.

I’ve been donating my time doing things for quite a few years and only stopped when I started teaching third grade in 1987. I was too busy then to volunteer for other things. Before that time I was a den mother for Cub Scouts for three years. And then I started a Brownie group which became my Girl Scout troop. I had them from the time they were in 2^nd grade until 12^th grade. Some dropped out and some new ones joined. I took them to Scout Camp in the summer,, and sometimes to a cabin in the winter. I took them on hiking trips and to Niagara Falls and Washington D.C. and lots of other places. By the time they were seniors they were busy doing other things, and I had started college so we disbanded then.

Also when my children were younger I taught CCD at my church. I didn’t stop that until my son got cancer and I needed to be with him at the Cleveland Clinic or at home.

As a teacher I didn’t have time to volunteer for anything else, but I always planned to volunteer for something once I retired. I thought about Habitat for Humanity. I had worked hard on the old house I’d bought by whacking out walls so my son could rewire the house and put up new walls, but I didn’t like the idea that on hot summer days I might be working outside. So I decided to sign up for Mobile Meals and I thoroughly enjoy this. Because I have other things going on, too, I only deliver every other Thursday and sometimes fill in for someone else who can’t do my route their day.

My old Ford Focus

When I was first taken on the route I would have, I was told not to spend too much time talking and get on with it so the clients would get their meals when the hot meals were still warm. For the first few years I had a long route with quite a few clients. At one house I often had a problem because the old woman who had been widowed the summer before would allow her dogs to run loose, and one seemed quite vicious. I must not have been the only one who had a problem with them because eventually her daughter would come to the Mobile Meals place to pick up her mother’s meals and take them to her on her lunch hour.

In spite of the fact that I wasn’t to waste time talking to my clients I still did. So many of them were lonely and a conversation seemed more important to them than the food. I always brought it into their home except for Rose who only wanted it in a box on the front porch. Sometimes I’d find a poem on a post card in the box. She often had a small dog tied to the front steps, but he was a nice dog. When the dog was there I’d knock on the door and she’d open the door and take the meal. One day she opened it a crack and said to come to the side door. She opened the door and asked me to come in. She wanted to give me one of her post cards with a poem she had written on it. I found out she wrote poetry. I started to share some of my poems with her, too. I was very sad when she passed on.

My grandmother and not Freda.

I had a woman who seemed rather spry and not so old. She had several cars she drove, and lived alone. She loved to talk and called me Sunshine. She never invited me in but was always at the door waiting for me. She was a heavy smoker so I didn’t mind standing on the back steps talking to her. She was a widow who had never had children, but she did have a stepson or two. She always gave me a Christmas present, too. Not much but sweet. I often gave my clients Christmas gifts, too. If they were diabetic it was sugar free candy, or maybe it was a Christmas tree ornament. One early summer day she told me she was going to Wisconsin to visit her stepson and would be back later. She never returned and I have no idea if she’s still alive or not.

Another woman, Freda, now lived with her brother. It was her house, but he’d moved in with her. She was quite old but spry and funny, too. If it was snowy she always swept off the steps before I came. She was a farm woman at one time and loved to talk to me while her brother sat in the other room in his recliner chair watching TV. One fall day when I came to her back door I jokingly commented on her beautiful flowers by the front porch (they were all plastic artificial flowers) She looked a little startled at first and then burst out laughing and said “would you like some seeds from them?” I laughed all the way to my next stop.

As time went on I could tell she was losing her mind a little. On cold winter days she was in her bare feet and sometimes looked at me as if she wondered who I was. Eventually, she was put into a nursing home because of Alzheimer’s disease.

This looks like one of my new clients.

Right now my route has shrunk. I only had four or five stops to make last week. There are a few more on my route, but not many and some are labeled Do Not Deliver. Maybe they’ve got a doctor appointment. One I really enjoyed visiting with because she never had visitors except for those who delivered meals, and she wanted to talk politics with me because her sister-in-law who would take her to doctor’s appointments voted for someone other than she and I did for the president in 2016. She had oxygen tubes in her nose with long thin tubes going across the floor to her oxygen tank. She hasn’t been on my route for over a month now. I heard she’d had some serious breathing problems and the person who delivered that day had to call for an ambulance.

David Doll is my client I’ve had the longest now. He lives in a small apartment behind his son and daughter-in-law’s garage which is below their large house. They take good care of him and every time I deliver his meal, he’s lying on a couch/bed in the back room watching a western movie on TV. I bring him a newspaper that’s published in Youngstown instead of Warren. He’s either a few months younger than me or a few months older. We joke about it sometimes. He’s the last one on my route, and we enjoy talking and joking.

Years and years ago one of my sisters was taking a philosophy course and said there is no true altruism. When we do good deeds for others it’s because it makes us feel good and boosts our ego. I argued with her at the time. Now I don’t consider it a boost to my ego, but rather something I enjoy doing that makes me feel good.

 Note:: I don't take pictures of my clients, but except for my grandmother the others were downloaded free from online.

What things have you done giving back?