Okay, okay -

[kyburg]

I don't know what's going on over there - but one of my birthday-sisters and her husband have put up a pair of posts this morning. And I don't even know if they're aware they're shadowing each other.

But the pair? Call it paying it forward -

First, his - Once upon a time I had a young wife when I was young and a newborn babe to take care of. No jobs...so I walked 5 miles to get to the local "plasma donating place" and sat with a needle in my arm for a few hours to get $15. On the way home I would stop and by myself a dough nut and a half pint of milk. The little that was left went to buy food for my wife and baby and other baby needs. I did that twice a week and I drank water the rest of the time....no food.

After doing this for 3 months I had lost so much weight and my iron levels dropped so low I could not "donate" any more. I sat on the stoop and cried.

One of the "vampires" (as we joking referred to the folks working there) was leaving for lunch and saw me sitting there in tears. He asked me what was wrong and I told him what was going on, and I told him the whole story. He told me he would be right back and went inside again.

A few minutes later he came out with a couple of the other employees of the place and told me they were going to give me a ride home, we ended up at a greek restaurant and they bought me a fantastic lunch. (lord_keeper)

But before, that? His wife elfwench had posted - So Keeper decided it was time for a field trip to the grocery store. The kids (then 8 and 11 years old) didn't know what a steak was, they confessed. So it was decided then and there that we would have a steak dinner and that it was time for a field trip to the grocery store. He'd been on short-term disability leave after breaking his hand at work, and he'd been living cheap at a friend's while getting his workman's comp, so he'd put back a bit.

He grabbed a cart, and told me and the kids to grab one too... four carts. And while I wasn't surprised at the second cart, I thought it was cute he was going to let the kids each push a cart and feel like they were helping. Little did I know that he was planning on filling each of the carts brimming full.

Is food kindness? It is when you need it - there are no ways seen to find a way through to enough of it, and yeah - the things you can't eat are sometimes just as important.

Both Jim and I grew up in homes without enough food in them (when I tell folks I also grew up in a home on WW, they don't get it. Yeah, the two can go together. Have a step-parent. The dynamics can get really wonky) - he won't touch a plate of liver and onions, for example. Me? Tuna fish sandwiches are still a guilty pleasure. We either had the tuna or the bread. Not the two together.

Insanely simple stuff - but this is where a lot of families live. Don't forget that.

Comments

[joggingguy.livejournal.com]

I remember a time when I was married to my ex-wife when the local economy had tanked and I was unemployed for 7 months. We hadn't lost our apartment yet, but everything else was running low, especially food. My family asked if I needed anything and I told them that if they wanted to clean out their freezer or pantry and give us thier old stuff, that would be great. You don't realize until later how hungry you can get until you are glad to eat brussel sprouts for a week.

One day we were coming back from running an errand and we stopped at an intersection in Humble TX, waiting for the light to change. And we just happened to see a $100 bill (of all things) just blowing by in the wind! We both jumped out of the car and my ex wife managed to snag it before it blew away. We were both incredulous. But the first thing we did was go straight to the grocery store and buy as much as we could for $100. First time our pantry was full in a long time. And I always wondered who was looking out for us then :-O

[vampireanneke.livejournal.com]

I've been lucky to never have to worry about food. The worst my family ever had to deal with was my dad's pay cut, and so he sublimented the income by bringing home shrimp and seafood from work. (He's a chemist and they would test a small corner of a block of shrimp, if it was good, well the rest went home with my dad or his other co-workers).

[kuangning]

Amen. I'm still not used to always having the cupboards full of choices. Or to being able to eat multiple real meals a day. At other points in my life, I made sure we had eggs, flour, milk, sugar, and butter, and those were the things that meant "security" to me -- I knew if we had nothing else but those, we would not go hungry, and at my mother's house, we seldom had all of those at once -- and everything else was "nice to have when we can". But I've still not quite made the leap from there to counting, say, fresh vegetables a necessity, or fruit.

[kali-ma.livejournal.com]

Me and my son were starving once and one day a friend of ours hijacked me from my "job" (street performing) and took me to a grocery store. THey had rounded up $40 from people (none of whom had much themselves) and this got us 2 weeks worth of food we desperately needed. I will never forget it.

[condotierre.livejournal.com]

Is food a kindness? Hell yes it is. It -does- make a difference between despair and just that shred of hope to hang on.

Growing up, I remember that food wasn't a problem, which I am very grateful for. But university --that was a whole different story altogether, especially when in a foreign country and restricted to limited working hours on campus at minimum wage. When the toss-up between rent and food came along, rent won, hands down. After graduation when the company I worked for suddenly retrenched all its foreign workers without warning, food got a little complicated especially when I developed gluten allergies but I couldn't afford the food I -could- eat. I will never forget sitting down in tears when a group of my friends got together and -shopped- an entire grocery cart's worth of food for me - they were in all different states - and had someone send it to my apartment.

It made all the difference in the -world-.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

Yes, food is kindness. Having gone through some periods of food insecurity while in the military (shocking, I suppose, but I wasn't near a base with services), the kindness of friends, colleagues and food banks is a great thing.

So is finding a $20 bill hanging in the grass in the backyard when you're broke.

growing up....

[tomlemos.livejournal.com]

as one of nine childen being supported by my father on his civil servants salary and my mom's waitressing tips and paycheck, we didn't have things like meat now and then to clutter up the dinner table. We had powered milk from time to time and other things for economy's sake.

It gave me plenty to think about when I'm in a poor state like I am now and believe me, steak is something that will always make me smile.

When you learn to live without, I find that life's little pleasures are when you can get something to eat that you don't have on a daily basis.

Because of this, I always provide my employees with a free meal whenever they work, and for those who work closely with me, my kitchen is always open to the occaisional grazer. Cup o' Noodles goes a long way.

I always do my part to help someone when I can because I'm a firm believer in karma, what goes around comes around.

Food is kindness. I know what a small amount of food can do for someone who's down on their luck.

Yes, it is.

[riverheart.livejournal.com]

When you're scraping by on less than $500 a month gross, when your employer hasn't paid you and your husband is working every day at Labor Ready just to try to keep ends from fraying (having given up on making those ends meet several months prior), when as much as possible of that $500 a month is going to keeping the phone service on and getting to job interviews, rather than food, food is a kindness.

catdeville was cleaning out her cupboards in San Diego, having just gone back onto Atkins, and getting rid of everything she ought not to eat. She sent us up, at her own expense, an enormous box of dry and canned goods that pushed the UPS weight limit. That formed the core of what we ate for months. By the time we had emptied the box, Charles was working full-time in Redmond and had already gotten his first paycheck, rather than working for Labor Ready.

And we will keep on paying it forward every time we can, by donating to the Food Bank in town. I collect food donations for the Food Bank at every Democrats' meeting in our legislative district, and take it down there, because we remember how it was when we didn't have much food or money, and because we remember Charles splitting his lunch (his main daily meal) with a guy on a Labor Ready jobsite who fainted because he hadn't eaten for three days.

[caitlin.livejournal.com]

Is food a kindness? Yes it most certainly is.

I've had several occasions (usually lasting more than a few days) that resulted in my having to scrounge for food or even not eat for most of the day. (note: I was in high school and typically skipped both breakfast and lunch, but ended up making up for that by eating at dinner... so I am thinking that the hypoglycemia is something I brought on myself, but it's too late now)

And then there is the time I had no job and was on Student Loans. I only had enough money for clif bars and almonds, bread, and some nutella, but the bread and nutella had to last 2 weeks each.

Even now, money's not that tight, but I often don't have either the time or inclination to buy food.

C.

I remember those times.

[bluemoonpnw.livejournal.com]

Christmas Gramma gave us a laundry basket full of food.
When we were low ....
Taco sauce sandwiches.
Sometimes lucky enough to have cheese.
I learned lots of cooking tricks.
A can of V-8, a pack of ramen and whatever scraps of veggies could be had were soup. (the packing shed would let us have the stuff that wasn't marketable)
Being "full" before we'd finished so that there would be plenty for the kid.
I remember.
Moon

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

OH, hell yes, food is a gift. I can remember being poor and starving and just *dreaming* about food.

We were particularly screwed because we were semi-homeless - hotel room, no fridge or way to cook anything. Six months like that. We'd go over to our friends' house once or twice a week to boil some rice or pasta - but they had six or seven people in a one-bedroom apartment with maybe three jobs between them, and coulldn't spare us much more than that stove access.

I used to dream about *hot* food. With protein in it, somehow. I was depressed and suffering panic attacks, and I've always had food sensitivities; I was terrified of going to a soup kitchen. Also, most of the kitchens were attached to shelters, and I'd rather live out of my car or a cardboard box than be trapped in a place like that with scary strangers. (And God, I wish I'd known my partner then was pre-diabetic - don't know what I could have done about it, but feeding us nothing but starch? Sigh.)

When we both landed jobs at the same retail store on the pier, our manager - one of the kindest people I know to this day - instead of using the "free lunch coupons" the pier restaurants gave him for employee motivators, he slipped them all to us. Those free lunches - real restaurant lunches, from the seafood restaurants - kept us on our feet through those first few weeks of working an eight-hour retail job, before a paycheck came in; I don't know if we could've done it on bread.

I still give McDonald's coupons away to the homeless sometimes, especially in the cold and rainy seasons. People say I should encourage them to eat healthier and they should go to the food bank and so on - but let me tell you, a 99 cent cheeseburger, when it's the first *hot* meal you've had in a week and your only meal of the day - it's like an angelic choir in your stomach, even if it gives you indigestion because it's the first meat you've had in weeks. It's *warm*. It's got enough weight to feel like real food, too, unlike the loaf of white bread you've been living off of.

I'd rather feed them Chinese or something a little more nutritious, but I can't carry coupons for those. And I know that, except for the meat/grease thing, McDonald's is pretty bland, and most people can manage to eat it. WHen I was starving, with my wonky stomach, I couldn't keep down spicy stuff - even mildly spicy stuff.

Later, we had housing but were still darn poor - we ate a little better, but I still dreamed of coming into some extra money and splurging on cheese and beef and ice cream and luxury foods. Of going to the grocery store and buying *anything* we wanted.

...I'm gonna go fix breakfast now - something hot - and go hug my refrigerator and stove. I don't need to buy groceries yet, but part of me wants to just because I can.

[vampireanneke.livejournal.com]

The more I read, the more I realize just how lucky I have been. The idea of the McDonalds coupons is something I'm going to do. I refuse to give money to the homeless directly.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Food - just your take-home leftovers - is always good. drave117 gave his Skillet leftover pancakes to the first homeless woman he saw on returning home last month - I'm sure she hadn't eaten so well in a long time.

Wish I could hang onto the dumb coupons long enough -

[poetpaladin.livejournal.com]

Touches my heart. I hope you don't mind, but I'm gonna point to these two in my journal, too.

*hugs you*

[elfwench.livejournal.com]

*blush*

I think my man and I are soulmates. Truly.