the amazing race: food bank style

the other night i helped the food bank deliver food boxes to needy people downtown. my partners were don and klayne who were really serious about team huddles and cheers and racing the other teams. at first i thought they might be cool until don said "fantastic" for the 785th time. also, one of them had b.o. i think. maybe it was my car. but i'm pretty sure it was one of them. AND they kept talking about how much they liked each other. they were nice guys.

but anyway, we had 6 people to visit. dolores had a million ailments and even more contraptions to help her deal with her ailments. she will never be healthy and will never leave her wheelchair, but she is one happy lady and cracked herself up several times in the ten minutes we were there...we chuckled politely. yolanda was a katrina refugee who'd fallen in love with the city and decided to stay. peter was a blind, nearly deaf man. he lived in darkness (literally, it was pitch black in his apartment) and we spent 20 minutes there helping him put his food away and watching him organize it by touch and sound (he shook the cans to know what was in them). he carried a card warning people of his inappropriate tendencies.

they all lived in small, very dirty apartments, most had some sort of physical or mental disability, and more than one had obviously at one time been a hard core drug user. and all i could think was "why am i so blessed? why do they have to face life with these burdens and i don't?" it was humbling to realize again just how good and rich and odor-free my life is. i have no right to complain. it's true what they say, that the best way to forget about your own problems is to help people with theirs.


plus it was good to see what's in those food boxes, because unless someone hires me, i'll be getting my own delivery one day. there was a ton of corn. and i hate corn.

man, i need a job.