I'm in the Army Now

Like many retirees, I’m looking for a way to "give back" after years of having given very little to the world except my terrific kids and a couple of useful medical articles.  I don't want to work in an office ever again.  I have no house building skills and I can't teach anyone to read. I have, however, always wanted to work in a soup kitchen, which combines cooking, feeding people, and feeling virtuous (nothing wrong with that, by the way).  On our way into Hudson, we pass the Salvation Army Center, a rather grim little building right on the edge of town and five minutes from the barn, which offers lunch Tuesday through Friday.  I Googled it and found they needed volunteers. Perfect, for in addition to having a soup kitchen, the Sally Army is meaningful for me in two other ways,

First, the SA was the only charity that my father donated to, because, as he told me when I was about eleven, "They didn't charge soldiers for donuts during World War II while the Red Cross did."  My father was never in the military, so he most likely got that information from his brother Bill, less than a year older than my Dad, who was killed in a tank unit at the Battle of the Bulge.  That Christmas I made my first donation ever: 10 cents tossed into the metal bucket of an SA bell ringer outside Woolworth's in Troy. I have given to the Army ever since, naturally with increasing amounts.  

Second, my very first job in New York City was in 1962 as a bag lady for the SA during my college freshman work term.  I worked for two pleasant women at the Barclay Hotel on 48^th Street, where the Army rented a suite.  For a weekly salary of $45, I filled little sacks with donation items and delivered them to high-end spots -- Bergdorf, Bendel, Twenty-one, Saks, Sardis -- where wealthy women who wanted Junior League credits picked them up and collected money from their friends. Bell ringers, but silent and golden. At night I joined my roommate in a one-room apartment with shiny turquoise walls on 9 West 84^th Street. We split an exorbitant rent of $100 a month for a place a block from the city's heroin center between Columbus and Amsterdam. We were broken into only once and it was the best time of my life. After that winter, NYC was my soul city. 

So three weeks ago I called Jill, the manager of the Hudson SA center, who said, "Yeah. Sure.  Come on in when you feel like it."  Encouraged by this casual acceptance I wandered in the next Wednesday and committed to work one day a week from 8 to one.

Because the Army, like most traditional churches these days, has experienced a continual decline in membership, it is testing out using some centers just for service, with no mission/evangelical efforts.  The Hudson SA center is the first in the state to be set up this way. Jill, who runs it, is Catholic and reports to an Army officer in Albany, who pretty much lets her run the center the way she wants.  And for good reason.  Jill has achieved a nearly impossible feat; her center makes money.  The revenues come from local Christmas bell-ringers -- business men, real estate agents, kids -- anybody that Jill can badger into volunteering. And, she gets so much food from local businesses and farms that she almost never has to resort to using her funds for buying any. So she makes a profit, which she hopes to use for new projects.

Jill is blonde, tough, attractive, funny, competent, and kind without being wimpy.  She should be everyone's boss. Four others typically work regularly at the center. Kevin and Sue are the cooks.  George and Charlie, who serve the lunches, lug boxes, wash floors and do anything else that's needed, are short, self-deprecating, kind, and always helpful, sort of like Santa's elves grown old.

When I first arrive at 8:00, I enter the dining area, a dowdy room, but pleasant and full of light, with four long tables, each set with 12 small fists of paper napkins wrapped around plastic utensils, and two empty tables waiting for the daily food deliveries. The SA kitchen opens off the dining room, a sketch of a small-town restaurant -- a big black stove, lots of huge cauldrons and monster bowls lining the shelves, back rooms with stacks of cans and boxes, cold storage areas piled with produce, and freezers full of ham, chicken, and beef. 

Jill and the cooks have already been there for about an hour, and if roasted meat is on the menu that day, it is already in the oven.   Kevin typically does the meat and likes to describe the marinades and rubs that he uses.  Once he puts his roasts in the oven, for the rest of the morning, punctuated by the occasional cigarette break, he tells stories about his past, describes his many unfinished projects, and complains about his Lyme disease to anyone who will listen. Kevin has been at the SA center for four years,  now on salary but originally assigned there by the Department of Social Services (DSS). He is a paradigm of how the sixties shaped and hammered its flower children into old age.  He has the apple belly and worn looking face from a life of too much booze and too many mind altering drugs providing too many unsubstantiated dreams; he's down but not yet out.

Sue is salaried and does all the rest of the cooking plus scullery duties. She is a straightforward, smart single mother, who works through chronic pain unrelieved by two previous non-helpful spinal and cervical surgeries.

Unless they are making salad that day, which requires a lot of chopping, I generally hang around listening to Kevin's stories until Sue and either George or Charlie return in the van from Walmart and Hannaford, where they have picked up boxes of donated meat, produce, and various baked and dry goods. Occasionally local farms send in fresh vegetables as well, Everything that comes in is weighed and recorded (sometimes my job), and then stored.  If the center can't store, cook, or pass all the food out at the weekly pantry, Jill has a call list of local churches and other charities that take the extra food.  Nothing is wasted.  A near-by farmer even collects the moldy bread for his live stock.

Around 11:30 the clients begin to wander in until lunch closes at 12:30 -- between 30 and 60 older white and black men and women, with a couple mothers and kids.  If Jill had a motto, it would be Zero Intolerance.  Anyone can eat there.  All you have to do is  walk in.  There are no conditions, requirements, or questions.  No one who works there preaches, and no one patronizes. (A few of the workers have been assigned from the DSS and are themselves only a step away from sitting at one of the tables.)  A food pantry is set up on Fridays and the diners can take home extra food that day after they eat.  Sue and Kevin also make a second full meal on Thursday for a local senior center.

So far this may be the best job I've ever had and if I can shrug off some of my essential lethargy, I might do more time. I'm not used to working in a place where no one is clutching their territory or eyeing a vice presidency with fearful resentment and where being of service is the only motivation.   I'm not sure I'm very useful, but I seem to be able to fill in on menial tasks. I found that none of the men will wash dishes, so at least I can do that, a mini-me scrubbing those huge pots and pans. I can also chop vegetables,  and last week, I nearly made the rice.  Maybe next Christmas, I'll join the volunteers who haunt every store in town throughout the season, puffing out steam, pink-cheeked, and frozen, a thick glove swinging the annoying persistent bell, and urging kids to put their first dimes through the wire screen of the metal bucket.