Two Encounters Around Food

1. 

At the Food Pantry yesterday:  Three young men came in, perhaps in their twenties, and approached the check-in table.

"Can we get some food?" the first one  asked, tentatively.  "We're homelesss.  We're living in a van."

"Sure," I said.  People are supposed to live in Berkeley or Albany to get food at the Pantry, but if they're homeless, they're homeless, and they still have to eat. 

We set up all three young men with clients cards and gave each  two bags of food.

"Oh, thank you!" they said.  "We were driving around wondering if it was okay to steal food because we were so hungry, and we passed this place.  God was looking after us."

After they left, my sidekick at the client table, Pat, who was raised a Catholic, said, "Stealing food is illegal,  but it's not a sin."


2.

I went to Berkeley Bowl West today, the enormous supermarket down near the 880 freeway.  As usual, it was packed with people, and it was a chore manuevering a shopping cart around.

I came to an intersection where three of us were head-on, nothing moving, and I quickly pulled around an older man, in-his-way-out-of-his-way, to get things moving.  As I passed him, he said, "You're welcome."

I turned around and stuck out my tongue at his back.  For quite a while.  If they have cameras in Berkeley Bowl and someone were watching, he must have wondered what that woman was doing.