Can We Still Hang Foragers?

Forget grass fed cows and organic shiso. Spurn the local free-range ducks and non-GMO beets. Get out in the field with long gloves and haul in the nettles, pick up the purslane, chomp on burdock roots. Gnaw on salads grisly and deeply bitter with dandelion greens, tiny sour sorrel, and the evil garlic mustard. Smoke your road-kill squirrel on the Weber in nests of fallen oak leaves. And take a chance on that pretty mushroom popping up on a log after a dewy night. Foraging is the new farming! And it's easy. You just go out and pick stuff off the ground.  

And chances are that if you own some woods and an old apple orchard, you also have at least one forager creeping on to it when you aren't around or early in the morning when sane people are asleep. These are deceptive humans, often attractive, all smiley and natural when they emerge from the woods, innocently coming upon you walking up Your Own Path and asking, "Oh, are those your woods? I didn't know that." They are typically clean, earnest, full of good will. Often Democrats. Possibly even contributors to Bernie Sanders' campaign. Foragers have the purest of intentions. They even have a code! But don't be tricked! They are cunning Gollum-like creatures, sneaking onto your land to seek out Their Preciouses – mushrooms, berries, black walnuts, rooty treats -- which are actually, by law, Your Preciouses.  

One fateful day a couple of years ago, when we were still weekending, Dave, our friend and landlord, brought over some oyster mushrooms, which, he explained, were given to him by Brenda (not her real name for reasons that will emerge), a forager who lived near by and taught students at the local college how to steal food from others. Dave owns the barn we live in, the old migrant quarters next to it – now a woodshop and garage for his tractors -- and the land and house across the road. We had bought the other half of the property, which surrounds his barn, selling an adjoining parcel to him where he keeps his bees. Dave said that he had told Brenda she could forage on this property, but she had wandered beyond his up into our woods and found a stash of oyster mushrooms. She had given him "some" of hers and he gave us half of his, which in retrospect seemed to be have been about five pounds.

"God, how much did she get?"

"I don't know. It was a lot."

"That's so cool. I wonder if she'll teach me how to find them," I said naively.  

A few weeks later, I was in our back yard and saw a woman talking to Dave outside the old migrant quarters. I went over to say hello and was introduced to Brenda.  

"Oh. Hi. I've been hoping to meet you. I understand you found some oyster mushrooms [like a truck load] on our property."

"Oh, was that yours? I thought it was Dave's."  

"No, our land starts a few hundred feet west of the barn. Anyway, I'd love to learn more about this. Where did you find the mushrooms?"

Long, seemingly thoughtful, pause. "Oh, I don't remember…"

Alarm bells . She's a mushroom expert! Mushrooms show up in the same spot every year. She has the oyster mushroom location stored on her GPS! I squinted back. "Well, let me know when you want to forage on our property again."

Brenda flashed me an open-faced cheesy lying smile, "Sure." 

The path on our property that leads west of Dave's barn is lined each year with thick black raspberry bushes, which I pick for syrups and jam or I just freeze fresh in bags. Two weeks after I met Brenda, the berries ripened. I spotted them on Sunday, already shiny and black, right before we had to head back to the city. Back upstate the following weekend, steel bowl in hand, I trotted eagerly up the path and stopped at the first berry bush. It had been stripped, and the grass around the briar patch was tamped down. I walked up to the next one. Same horrifying denuded nubs. On and on up the path. No berries, just evidence of someone or something tromping around the ravished bushes. "The forager!" I growled.  

In my knee-jerk socialist days, I would quote Proudhon: "Property is theft." Now that I owned property, however, what ran through my berry-greedy brain as I walked from fruit ruin to ruin was a comradely affinity with the old English squires, righteous in their anger at poachers, fortunate in their ability to nab these thieves, rabbits dangling from their belts, and to string them up without any consequences. Viva la ancien regime!  

Once I learned from Dave that Brenda and a friend had been there earlier that week swimming in his pond, I needed no other proof. I sat down and wrote her what I believed was a reasonable and irate letter. She was renting a house near us and I drove by and stuffed it into her mailbox. Michael says I called her a "thief". I don't remember that, although in hindsight, I think that that I was one rant away from cutting and pasting the words from tabloid headlines. I might have gone a little overboard.

I added my phone number to the letter, and a couple days later I heard Brenda on my voice mail insisting on her innocence and suggesting that a bear might have eaten the berries. "Ha!" I said out loud and subsequently to all my friends and a few strangers, "A bear does not gently pluck single berries off a bush and carefully tread around it."  

I returned Brenda's call but only got her voice mail. I left a message, but she never returned it. She did call Dave, however, and argued her case to him because he's far cuter than I am, saying that she would never have picked my raspberries and always obeyed the forager code. "We only take a handful of anything we pick," she piously told him (forgetting, I guess, the 15-pound oyster mushroom haul she had pulled out of my woods).

To my relief, Brenda moved out of our neighborhood in the fall, and I figured that was the end of her. I relaxed my vigil. The following raspberry season was both bear- and forager-free, and I bagged about three gallons of them.  

Then, last spring, I found a morel. I had long suspected that these yummy mushrooms lurk beneath the old apple trees that spider among the thorny webs of multiflora rose and nasty honeysuckle, which coat most of our acres. Morels might be the safest wild mushrooms to forage. With their blonde spongy bee hive hairdos, they seem to have few toxic twins, and even those apparently don't kill you.

So last year, I Googled around and discovered a great site called morelhunters.com. I learned that they hit our area around mid-May. It was then too late in the month, but I decided to check anyway under the dying trees of the old orchard.  There, I discovered a wide well worn path skirting through masses of brush from apple tree to apple tree. Too wide and well trodden even for morel-loving bear. Foragers! Grrr.

I followed the path, poking about, until, under a battered old trunk, I found one soggy and forlorn morel. I brought it home in triumph, set it on a plate, and a slug crawled out of it. The mushroom lay there for a couple weeks, getting creepier every day until I finally tossed it out. But it was an inspiring event, and I was intent on getting started early this year.

Morels emerge when the soil temperature reaches 50 degrees, but this winter was so cold and the spring so dry that I failed to spot any when I started checking the trees in early May. I did, however, spot Brenda. That same week, sitting on the swing and reading my Kindle in the back yard, I saw a car drive up and a woman and her dog get out, walking up the path toward the top of our hill where our apple orchard lies. She didn't look over and didn’t see me. I headed over to the base of the path, silently (and I hope with a Squire-like menace) watching her peer about in the grass, her cute muttish hound pouncing around beside her. He started to trot toward me. She looked up and slowly followed him down until she was within stringing-up distance.

"Hi," she said, "I'm Brenda," and held out her hand.

"I know. I'm Carol." I shook her hand as if she wasn't in any danger, "I met you a couple years ago. We had an altercation."

Not missing a beat, she responded, "Oh, you know, I never took those raspberries."  

"Well…"  

She glanced back up toward the hill, "I've been looking for nettles." Right. "Dave said I could check for them on his property."

"Well, actually, you were on our property."

"Oh, really? I didn't know that. I thought it was Dave's property." She added carelessly, "I didn't see anyone around." 

"Our car is in the garage. We're up here full time now."  

"Oh, well, I thought it was Dave's property." She repeated.  

"No." I waved at a flagged stake a short distance up the path behind us. "That marks the end of Dave's land and the beginning of ours." She had been wandering about 50 feet beyond the stake.  I was too gracious to mention that we had pointed this out two years before.

"Oh, that's good to know…" Pause, then awkwardly. "So, I was looking for nettles. I'm really a mushroom expert, but I'm trying to learn about other things." Nettles are trash plants, growing on every available patch of earth throughout the Northeast. So what a coincidence that an expert fungi poacher would seek the ubiquitous nettle in mid-May right by the thief-worn path where I had found my slug-infested morel. And why wasn't she wearing gloves? Nettles sting.  

But it was a beautiful day, she was earnest and friendly, and her dog was adorable. "Look. If you want to forage on our land, just call me. I'd really like to follow you around and learn about nettles..and other things."  

"Sure." Same open-faced deceptive smile, but I had grown bored with revenge.

We exchanged phone numbers, just like new BFFs would do, and she gaily got back into her car with her bouncy cute dog and took off. I guess she hadn't been all that excited about the nettles. And she missed the wild strawberries.  I hope she calls.

The Alpha and Omega for Our Green Machine

To build a house, you start by digging.  Last November, we dug the first critical hole toward excavating our site: the perc (short for percolation) test.  The land had been cleared of its miserable thorny life and a brush pile the size and shape of a small hangar had been pushed back against the south side.   We then knew where we wanted our home to be, but we couldn't commit to its location without knowing at the outset where all our biologic outcomes were going to end up. We needed to locate the septic field, then we could work backward. The last shall be first.

Present at the perc ground breaking event were Michael and me, Pete our contractor, Neal the engineer, Evan the digger, and someone from the Health Department who was there to make sure our waste wouldn't be seeping into the Hudson water system. He gazed sleepily around, ambled behind everyone, and as far as I remember never spoke. 

The perc test is a surprisingly simple process for determining the location for such critical final results.  Neal first dug a small hole -- a foot or so deep -- around the area that would serve as our ideal septic field, a few hundred feet northeast of our fantasy house, up a slope and a safe distance flow-wise from where we wanted to garden and dig our pond.  Neal filled the hole with a bucket of water and then we all stared at the water as it percolated into the soil.  It's like watching a very, very slow race, where the water in the winning hole drops an inch within ten minutes.  Our hole beat this time.  Neal, who looks and sounds disconcertingly like Gary Shandling, flashed a toothy grin.  "Terrific." 

Evan hopped into a small digger and forked out the hole until it was about six feet deeper, first clawing up a thick layer of cakey top soil, then about four feet of silty loam, finally scraping across a base of gray clay. Everyone was excited.  Apparently this is a really, really good shit hole.  Pete looked down, "You don't ever see this in Columbia Country."

Neal nodded his head in agreement, and, as his only contribution to the event – but a welcome one -- so did the Health Department person.

Pete turned to us. "This could save you over $20,000.  If the clay were at a higher level, you'd have to build a berm."

"Huh." I said. "What's a berm?"  I have never owned a house. As an adult, I have always lived in apartments where God's representatives – superintendents and management agents -- took care of life's comforts. I envisioned a hideous above ground tank that stored our refuse, hoisted up through a pipe and pump contraption, where it festered until some low-paid local came around with a giant sucking hose and trucked it off to a toxic dump. Neal explained that a berm is a big mound of earth, high and porous enough to allow the sewage water from the septic tank to percolate.  At the time, I wondered why an earth hump would cost $20,000, but I have learned over the past few months after watching our house and land budget slowly bulge up to morbid obesity that $20,000 is a bargain.

Evan dug a few more holes in other places, but the original $20,000- saving hole remained the best spot. 

We then walked down toward the southeast base of our site where I hope to have a swimming pond. After only a foot, Evan's digger hit clay and water.  Pete smiled, "You won the lottery again.  Perfect for a pond."  Neal agreed, showing us his toothy grin and he pushed a couple of tiny flags into the earth to designate our septic field and pond.  We handed the health inspector a check for $500 as payment for his silent but essential presence in blessing our excretion field, and everyone left.  Except for a few visits from the surveyors, our recent nasty winter closed off the site and that was the end of earthmoving for the next few months. 

So we had the place where all things must end, and, with spring well in place, last week the Greenport highway department dug out the culvert for the driveway, where all things must begin. As with the berm, I didn't know what a culvert was -- or rather I had some misguided ideas from low-grade movies and books. "Children, stay away from the culvert!"  But the hapless toddler or reckless unappealing teener would crawl anyway into a nearby steel maw gaping out of the earth, where a rattlesnake would bite her or he would be washed away in a sudden flash flood. Culverts were also excellent locations for dumping murder victims. I didn't realize until last week that they had any purpose other than contrivances for bad plots. However, since attending Home Building University I have learned that if you don't have a culvert, your driveway will dissolve with the first big rain in the spring or will turn into a skating rink in the winter.

 The Greenport Highway Department is in charge of culverts, and as it happens, we know the Greenport Highway Supervisor, an appealing young man, who lives on our road.  He's also running for re-election this year on the Democratic slate, so we've been to the same local town and democratic committee meetings. With the first attempt, the worker placed the culvert too near the surface of the driveway and the gravel area was too narrow to support the monster trucks that will be bringing in the modules for our house. I assume our neighbor noticed that the trench was insufficient on his way home, because the workers came back the next day with even larger and louder equipment, which dug out a deeper trench and gave the culvert a thick layer, top and bottom, of excellent gravel.  The Supervisor's good attention to our culvert might be due to neighborliness or to my recent elevated positions as Treasurer of the Greenport Democratic Committee and as a member on the data-mining subcommittee of the voter registration committee of the Columbia County Democratic Committee.  Or he might just be an excellent Highway Supervisor.  It doesn't matter. He has my vote.  Local politics.  It's how they get you but that's another plotline in our Hudson story.

At this time, however, the plot to our house has most of our attention.  And now that the alpha and omega have been established, let the tracts and tunnels between them begin! But children, stay away from the culvert!

Celebrating My Birthday With Mr. Death

When I was about seven, an elderly neighbor, a Seventh Day Adventist who had been driven out of Nazi Germany, taught me the Lord's Prayer.  Even at that age, its King James cadence and exotic "shall" and "thou" and the image of god as a shepherd were thrilling and comforting.  Not so thrilling or comforting were her descriptions of the Nazi death camps, particularly a story about a female guard who made lamp shades out of Jewish skin. As a sop to the stories, she described Heaven as a noiseless, bland place made of gold, which inexplicably made her feel better in spite of that terrible knowledge.  It did nothing for me. About the same time, our school officials treated us with movies of the atom bomb going off in huge mushroom clouds. Hiding underneath our tiny maple desks during "duck and cover" exercises was about as reassuring as the gold plated Paradise. So by the time I was eight, I had discovered the inevitability of death and the void of non-being, and that the adults in the world were of no help at all.  (I believe that the intensity of the feminist movement rests on our early knowledge that guys were not going to protect us or our babies any more. In fact, they were out to get us.) Mr. Death became my annoying and more or less constant companion from then on.

So, I not only established a nightly Lord's Prayer, but to bolster its effects I tacked on two extra sections. The second part was a litany of fears: "Please don't make me die of polio, diphtheria, or diabetes.  Please make everyone live, our goats, our cats, our dog, Mom, Dad, my brother, my sisters", and, to play it safe "all my friends and relatives". (I left out our chickens.)  I later added a plea that god would make me forget about the "horrible man" and "horrible woman."  The former was the Phantom of the Opera, whose burn-scarred face appeared in a Classic Comic (ironically, the only comics we were allowed to read).  The horrible woman was the Nazi guard. Sometimes I was so sleepy that I caught myself repeating part 2, which, in my little OCD brain, I thought might negate the effects of my many critical prayer requests, so as a fail safe, I ended this section with "Please answer all my prayers whether I said them three times or not." 

The third part of my prayer was a conversation with god himself, a short chubby balding elderly man, who wore glasses. He vaguely resembled my grandfather. I have no idea why god showed up in my mind looking like this, but it must have been a powerful avatar, because he performed years later in a couple significant adult dreams.  Although a good Methodist child, I gave up Jesus when I was about eight, after my Catholic friend repeated a nun's story about a little girl with diabetes, who saw Jesus appearing before her while she was in bed and died the next day.  That night I apologized to Jesus and told him I had to pray directly to god from then on and to "please, please, don't visit me."

I produced this three-part prayer every night, even after my Dad turned from the Methodist to the Unitarian Church when I was thirteen and the family gods became Emerson and Jefferson.  Nevertheless, until I was eighteen, I repeated my DIY beadless rosary, hoping for some kind of spiritual experience, some god-pat-on-the-head that would muffle the ever-present thought that some day I would Cease to Be.  Nothing like that happened. In fact, during that time my cats, my dog, my goats all passed way.  My real grandfather died. I continued to think about the horrible woman, although the horrible man's effect lessened.  On the positive side, those nightly talks with Grandpa God did provide some comforting closure to the day.

When I left home for college, however, I finally gave up my talks with the Ur-Gramps. My freshman year, right before Christmas my childhood best friend died in a fire in her prep school dorm.  She was overweight and had played Santa Clause that night for her classmates.  The Christmas tree was under her room and caught fire. It was my first Other Death. I had no idea how to grieve or deal with her loss. I read Kafka, Sartre, Camus, and Dostoyevsky, to make myself feel worse, and if I prayed at all, it was that I wouldn't die a virgin. I renounced Grandpa God, who hadn't been helpful at all, to have sex with boys my own age.  That prayer was answered, probably too enthusiastically. My Holy Grail became the Hunt for True Love, enabled by the sixties, when Love was not just cheap but Free. 

The following decade was noisy with war, babies, sex, protests, and my first marriage breaking on the shoals of Viet Nam.  It wasn't until I was 28, living in Bayonne, New Jersey, with two toddlers less than a year apart, that I started looking again for spiritual context.  Because this time my Death Fear now also included those small beings I had forced out into Life, and, so eventually, Not Life. I needed a spiritual fix to pass on to them, but Jesus and Grandpa had been out of the equation for years.  So, I looked West toward Esalen and Buddhism. I began my life-long erratic and haphazard meditation habit, sitting cross-legged and badgering my brain with Alan Watts, transcendental meditation, Krishnamurti, various yoga instructors, basically picking up anything that fell off the Great Spiritual Babble Truck as it traveled coast to coast.

Also to assuage Mr. Death, during these years I discovered my perfect career. I learned about medicine, disease by disease, writing them up as mysteries and updating them with biologic or pharmacologic clues, which I hoped would some day solve these murderous or painful cases.  I knew for sure my work was just a stopgap measure against the ultimate end, but satisfying nonetheless. 

So now I have left behind this career, my childrearing, my sexual falls to come North, to my roots, to build a house and, eventually, to sleep.  My birthday this week recalculates once again the increasingly smaller percentage of my remaining average life span.  When Michael and I get together with our same-age friends, the conversation often drifts to how we might off ourselves at the end if we get really, really stupid.  I talk agreement, but I probably won't do it.  I love my life.  I've loved it since I was in the womb.  I am going to be very sad when it's over and I probably will be inanely eager to see what happens next as I get really really stupid. 

Meditation is annoying and very hard,  but it is the only broom I have that can sweep the brain clean. Although most of the time, it's listening to words rattling like bones in a spiritual desert, every once in a great while Something Happens. On the land that we bought here is a ridge, more like a big rock hump, which has a long view of the Catskills to the west.  Because of the easement we established, no one can ever build a house on that rock, including us, but they can meditate on it, or pray to Grandpa God, or just sit.  

I've stopped looking for spiritual reassurances, either from the West or the East.  It's just me on the hill now, cross-legged, and sitting there with Mr. Death. On occasion, when the mind clears out something wordless shrugs me into a space of overwhelming Niceness, which, at that moment, includes everything: me, the birds, the rocks, the trees, every creature, human or not, alive or dead, whom I've loved and not loved, whom I failed to protect.  This is followed by the delusional notion that the adventure may not be over.  I stand up and walk down the hill, the noisy brain immediately reinstalled, and I am once again arm and arm with the inscrutable Mr. Death. However, increasingly, after such meditations, I notice he's getting pudgy, his hair is thinning, he may need reading glasses, and we are beginning to converse.

Loaves, Fishes, and Potato Salad

"Only one! You take only one. Everyone has to eat." George yells at a tall lanky older guy who is leaning over a carton filled with boxes of cereal, clutching two in his hand. He scowls back at George, drops one, and moves on. A short stocky woman takes his place and puzzles through the Cheerios and Rice Krispies. A woman holding a small boy's hand reaches into a box of small packaged cakes and hands him one. At the end of the line, two women discuss whether the lettuce is too wilted.

 It's Friday at the Hudson Salvation Army Center, where, along with the daily lunch, the weekly food pantry helps feed its neighbors. The pantry is open from 8 to 10 AM, although some people start lining up outside at five, leaning against the front wall where there is no shelter, even in icy nasty weather. The only requirement is that you sign in and give your address and the number of people in your family. The tables that will later be set for lunch are now laid end to end, lined with a train of boxes and cartons containing the donations of the week: cans of soup, stews, and vegetables, boxes of cereal and bags of edible chemistry, fresh produce, frozen meats, and baked goods.

The donors for both the daily lunches and the weekly food pantry include local supermarkets, businesses, non-profits, and farms. The food varies depending on the season or what a donor wants to get rid of that week, either from overstock or customer disinterest. In addition to the pedestrian carrots, onions, potatoes, and apples, the pantry also occasionally provides more exotic treats, like frozen tripe and chicken livers, raspberries, mangoes, avocadoes, chilies, and artichokes. Hawthorne Valley, a local organic farm, once contributed cartons of fresh goat cheese and yogurt because there was an error in the labels. (Confession: I took some home.) There are also, of course, the awful products that don't sell. For a whole month we were graced with bags and bags of Lay's cappuccino potato chips, one of several loathsome winners of its contest, "Do Us a Flavor", in which Americans who prefer dinner munched out of a bag can suggest a subhuman idea for a new potato chip flavor. I can hardly wait for P&J and lobster roll.

 Jill, the Hudson Salvation Army manager, is often at the door letting in, one by one, those still waiting outside, occasionally greeting a regular with a sardonic tease. Jill isn't a Salvation Army member; she's Super Woman. A few years ago, the Army was about to close down the place, but decided instead to hire her to run the kitchen and pantry as a service center for the poor, with no evangelical mission. Jill is attractive, blonde, and a townie. She knows everybody and cajoles, bullies, and shames enough local businessmen, kids, and friends from kindergarten to ring bells at Christmas and convinces enough local farms and stores to contribute food, so that at the end of the year the center makes money. With a cheerful toughness she subdues diners who are about to go off the skids on too many morning beers or weird drug mixtures and kindly but scarily reprimands volunteers who don't wear their hairnets or sneak too much free food into their bags without asking her first. Best boss ever! She has recently begun to tease me incessantly about the number of pots and utensils I use. I finally feel part of the team!

When the pantry line has dwindled down so that it only needs one or two volunteers to deal with it, Sue, the primary cook and the only driver among us, and Charlie, the primary volunteer and also the best human being in the world, take off in the center's white cargo van heading for Walmart and Hannaford, the center's two biggest donors, for the bi-weekly pick-up. When they return, the van often packed to the roof, anyone working or volunteering that day helps unload the boxes. Charlie, who is 70ish and about five-four, cheerfully hauls out fifty-pound boxes of frozen beef. Everyone else has injuries, but they all carry. Sue has had two spinal surgeries. George is stiff with back pain, and Jermaine is in line for two shoulder surgeries from repetitive stress injuries suffered on the assembly line at Kaz, a local industry that pulled out a couple years ago and headed for Mexico and cheaper labor. (Some of the many employees it left behind are still pantry and lunch regulars.) The boxes are stacked, weighed and recorded in the lunch room, and Charlie tries to get them stored away as fast as possible so that we can clean the tables in time for the daily meal, which starts at 11:30.

 Every Friday and Wednesday, also a pick-up day, hundreds of pounds of donated food gets levered, piled, and shoved into one cooler, a couple of freezers, and a smallish pantry, with not enough time or volunteers to organize them so that the best ingredients are readily available. Every meal becomes a challenging decision based on whatever we can reach that day that could make up the daily rations for 20 to 40 diners, the number of whom depend on whether it's early in the month (food stamps have come in) or at the end (food stamps have been used up.) By the end of the week, most of the perishable food has been used or given away and the storage areas are ready for the next tsunami of donations.

 Since Sue is busy doing the pantry and driving the van I like working Fridays best because I sometimes get to cook the main course. Usually she has prepared most of the food the day before, or she and Jill have already gotten the meat into the ancient oven long before I come in at eight o'clock, but sometimes she'll have left me trays of thawing fish, big tubes of ground beef, or chicken strip to inspire me. A couple weeks ago I cobbled a beef stew together using extra steak and vegetables from lunch the day before. This week I took filets of tilapia and salmon, drenched them in egg and buttermilk dressing, dipped them in bread crumbs. and baked them. My recent triumph was a classic potato salad that included 25 hard boiled eggs, three pounds of bacon and some pickles, celery, and onion, all soaked in a combination of mayonnaise and yogurt dressing, livened up with two tubes of dill and a handful of dried thyme.

Even if Sue is cooking, the rest of us fill in with making salads, cutting vegetables, and offering advice. It's always a team effort, and everyone talks all the time. Sue just bought a mobile home and she shares photos of the newly painted walls and kitchen. Rhea reports her latest kid triumphs and berates the lousy Hudson school system. Jermaine, wedged in the corner on the only stool, craftily waits until one of the women innocently calls out, "That's too thick," or "Use the long one," an opportunity for him to comment, "That's what she said." (The kitchen humor is typically at this level regardless of the source.) George, a fellow ex-New Yorker, remembers his lost years in retail selling high-end fabric, describing with wistful nostalgia the extraordinary Scalamandre silk tiger velvet he once sold to clothe the couches of the very, very rich. He takes knitting breaks when there's nothing to dice, slice or cut. (In fact, George is knitting me a fabulous small teal purse, and we've been trying to figure out if he can scale it and make money on Etsy.)

When lunch starts, Jermaine and Charlie do most of the serving. As the diners come in, Charlie calls in the count from the doorway. "Five!" So if I'm at the stove, I'll pull down five plastic plates and try to guess how much to portion out from the trays of roasted meats and cauldrons of rice or potatoes and vegetables so that the food lasts through the hour. It almost always does, and so we have left-overs to pack up for ourselves if we want and always for Charlie, who walks from his apartment downtown to the center every day – even throughout this awful winter -- and is in the kitchen by four or five in the morning to set up and is the last to leave. He has no family that I know of and started volunteering after he retired, when the decades old toy store he had worked at shut down. Unlike the rest of us, Charlie says little, but I've never seen him angry or mean, and when he smiles, which is often, it is beatific.

With its one daily meal for its 30-odd guests, the Hudson Salvation Army Center is a kid's idea of a restaurant, a cartoon drawn with broad strokes and in two-dimensions. Each of the six tables are sparsely dressed with small fists of forks and knives wrapped in paper napkins, plastic cups tipped upside down beside them, two pitchers of water and juice anchoring each end, and a tiny pot of viciously bright plastic flowers set in the middle. The kitchen is a flea market of weary whisks, spoons, and spatulas, dull knives and can openers. A huge meat slicer that no one uses takes up most of one counter. A battered trio of sinks barely fit the sled-wide oven trays, wide-mouthed monster pots, and plastic salad bowls the size of koi ponds, so when we wash them, water spews everywhere. The venerable black professional stove has six burners that can boil five gallons of water in 10 minutes but are so close together that just three pots fit at one time. We have to triple any baking or roasting time, because its senile oven takes about an hour to stoke itself up to a max of 350.

But it's always fun and I've never worked with a better bunch of people. I don't actually serve lunch to the diners so I only know the regulars by sight and gossip: the deaf guy who does sign language with a companion while they eat, Chris who has to chew very slowly or else she chokes, Cookie who always pops his head in to thank us (notably complimenting my potato salad), the ketchup guy, the stoned and irritating woman who complains about the food so often that I'm really happy when she likes it, the guy who doesn't eat beef, the guy who doesn't eat pork, Carlos who was put into a mental home when he was twelve and let out twenty years later, the homeless guy who lives in the park, the cute sculptor who comes in at the end. Last Friday, when we served my tilapia and salmon, a couple of regulars complained that they didn't eat fish. One of the volunteers that day said, "How can they gripe about the food when it's free?" But I was pleased. It meant they felt entitled to good food, and why shouldn't they, just like any diner anywhere in any establishment, even at our restaurant at the back end of the Universe. We're here to serve.