Sitting in the Cold

I volunteer at the Berkeley Food Pantry every Monday from 1-4 pm. A Quaker church donates space in its basement, which we share with a Montessori preschool.

The first hour at the pantry we prep: Bag bread ( often Acme bread, the likes of which are served at Chez Panisse), stuff handfuls of loose lettuce into plastic bags, whack watermelons in halves or quarters, carve egg cartons in half with a serrated knife and fill each half with eggs, if they're available. We're all volunteers, except Bill, the part-time director. Grace fills produce bags with silky smooth onions, knobby carrots, potatoes, sometimes yams, whatever's in season. Judy or I fill paperbags with USDA food: cans of pears or applesauce, spinach, green beans, paper bags of grits, plastic bags of pinto beans. Bill hauls shallow boxes of bullet-hard chickens out of the freezer. We old-timers suggest simple tasks to whatever new volunteer has materialized and hope they'll show up the next week. Many defect. The work is repetitive, and many of our clients are too preoccupied or demoralized to thank us. And the volunteers who stay in the in the back room loading bags, cutting down empty boxes, restocking shelves, never see the clients.

But I do. The second and third hours at the pantry I sit at a long table in the front room. The door is open at all times. It is cold. One at a time, clients hand me their driver's license --if they haven't lost it, if they remembered to bring it--to show they live in Berkeley or Albany. I look up their card in one of four boxes of file cards. I see that they are eligible for their monthly bag of groceries. I note the date. I"m cold. I sit on an icy metal chair that I pad with a blanket from my car. I'm cold. Last week I wore a turtleneck sweater, a flannel shirt, a fleece vest, jeans, a rain jacket, and a blanket over my legs. The clients are cold, too, and some have waited in line for an hour before we open for business.

Lately, there are so many clients that it's all I can do to keep up. I fill out a form for each eligible client,my friend Judy collects it, and hands over bags to each client. Some are "99-ers" who've exhausted their unemployment benefits. Some come straight from hospitals. Some are victims of domestic violence. Many live in single-room occupancy hotels on University Avenue where their only cooking facilities are a microwave and maybe a hot plate. Some cry.

After the pantry closes at 4 pm, we clean up, fill out paperwork, sweep, and go home. Sometimes while I'm sitting at the table, freezing and checking in clients, I think about how I can go to Berkeley Bowl supermarket and buy anything I want, how I can go to a warm house and have a glass of sherry. I'm very lucky, but I'm still freezing cold on Mondays, and I don't really know what to do about it.