by Julie D. Andrews
| The temperature was below freezing. Sheets of glossy ice covered the streets. It was one of those nights where if your hands weren’t tucked into pockets or stuffed into gloves they would get tingly numb within minutes.
Just a few blocks past the posh Hotel Carlyle, where the cover charge on any given night can cost $90, some good people on the Upper East Side were making sure that cold, hungry mouths had warm food to eat.
It was 6:15 p.m. when I arrived to the basement of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church on a Thursday night. |  | | The kitchen was brimming with activity. I was handed an apron and put to work. There was salad to be prepped. A lot of it – 152 paper bowls needed to be filled with lettuce, two cherry tomatoes, and two carrots.“No skimping,” said the woman beside me to the food preparers who had crowded around the steel table.
The food here was purchased by the church and is prepared by a Chef named Liz who was hired to cook the weekly meal for the needy.
“One fifty two,” said the woman handling lettuce. “That’s how many salads we need. One fifty two,” she said again and again.
A man standing at the table began counting the bowls on the table. “Place them so they can be counted,” he said, rearranging the bowls. He started adding them up, would stop, and then start adding again.
“Thirty six,” he said. His finger was in the air, he was doing the math. “So, we need one hundred sixteen more,” he said.
“One fifty two,” said the woman, again, repeating the mathematical equation. The arithmetic was discussed at length, back and forth, by the man and the woman.
“Enough” said a tall man named Livingston, the man who helps run the soup kitchen. “How many we got?”
“Thirty six,” said the woman.
“How many we need?” he asked.
“One sixteen,” she said.
“Well, Ok then.”
It’s only then that I realized. Two of the people standing next to me in the kitchen had come to dine. They had come to eat, and they were also helping to prepare the food.
A local fifth grader, who came to volunteer with his father, loaded salads onto a tray.
Next, Liz, the chef, brought out cherry pies warm from the oven.
Again, a crew gathered round and worked busily. Everyone seemed to know what to do.
Paper plates were handed out. Pie slices were cut and plopped onto plates. The cart was loaded and pushed out to the dining area which was now full with people.
It was time to serve dinner.
Tonight, on the menu was beef and mushrooms over rice with mixed vegetables. Vegetarians would be served pasta shells and marinara sauce. There were hot rolls with butter. And for dessert, there was cherry pie.
The line looked endless. One face after the next stood in front of me, holding out a plate, saying thank you and hurrying off to eat.
“How’s everybody doing tonight?” asked one man with a scruffy beard as he held out his plate.
“Doing all right” said the white-haired plump man at my far left who was serving up rice. “And you?” he asked in kind.
“Doing great,” he said. “If I were doing any better, they’d put me away.” Oddly, there was no sarcasm in his voice.
When he reached the end of the procession, the man asked the boy standing next to me, nearly patting his shoulder, “How’s school going? It’s going OK?” as if he were not in line at a food pantry but at a family reunion chatting with his long lost nephew.
The boy smiled, shrugged. “Yeah, it’s going Ok.”
Then, in front of me, holding a plate stood the woman who had been doing arithmetic in the kitchen.
“Mmmmmm,” she said. “Looks so good… Are you coming back next week?” she asked me as I emptied a scoop of mixed vegetables onto her paper plate.
Then she mandated, “Yes, you come back next week.” She told me that she rode her bike to the church on this night from downtown, despite the slick ice patches covering the roads.
Then, a woman in her 60s with sky-blue eyes stood in front of me. She smiled at me softly. “Such a pretty girl,” she said in a thick accent. She beamed. “You come back next week?” she asked.
Later, the same woman, Margot, would cut in the ‘seconds’ line without realizing it.
“The line is back there,” instructed the man at my left.
With a coy grin, she obeyed and got at the end of the line.
Again, she smiled at me. “Such a nice girl,” she said this time as I scooped up mixed vegetables for her. It was a wonder she didn’t pinch my cheeks.
Then, a young man barreled through the line. He was making a ruckus. He was as high as a kite.
He had waited in line but hadn’t been coherent enough to pick up a tray or a plate. At the end of line, he stood watching as others who had been holding out trays walked away with plates piled thick with food. He grew confused, angry.
“Where’s my food? I want some food! Why won’t you give me some food?” he asked.
A tray and plate were passed down and filled for him. He went to eat, and started yelling at the people sitting around him.
Others in line apologized for him.
“One in every group,” said a man looking at me, rolling his eyes.
Men and women, mostly men, shuffled through the line, with tussled hair and pants pulled up high that fell loose around skin and bones. Many of their pockets were stuffed with plastic bags. Many of their faces looked worn and tired. There was a confused look in some of their eyes, a vague look of being lost.
One man came up and in a serious, near-perturbed tone said, “I don’t eat corn.”
The pan of vegetables in front of me was full of dots of peas and corn intermingling nicely with green beans. I looked at him unsure of what he wanted me to do.
Then, I got it. And, something about the way he was looking at me made me want to stand there and funnel out all the kernels of corn in the full spoon of vegetables for him. He was sick. And, this would make him happy. I never give money to homeless people on the street. But here I was rifling through a pan of vegetables for this man.
Later, one of the other volunteers told me that every week the same man would mention a food allergy and ask the server to avoid some food that was mixed into to the recipe being served that night.
Others asked for extra rolls. It wasn’t possible for me to say no. I handed over an extra roll, sometimes two.
“Hey, do you think I could have another roll?” one man whispered on the sly.
Others took a different approach, “My, those rolls are so good,” said another man. “What are those things called? Do you think I could have another?”
“I think they’re called dinner rolls,” I said as I handed over two rolls and a few extra slabs of butter.
“Ha, ha, ha. Dinner rolls. Yes, that’s it. Dinner rolls,” said the man as he walked away.
While scooping out vegetables I was told that about 70 people had shown up, but that it appeared the cold had kept many of the regulars away. Most of the people at the food pantry had shelter, I was told, but not enough money for food.
Despite the low turnout, every pan of food was empty at night’s end.
The crowd started to clear out around 7:30 p.m.
And, yet, some people wanted to stay.
One man sat alone at a table in a ragged sweater long after others have left. He lifted the fork slowly to his mouth. He seemed to like sitting being left in the quiet to sit at the table and eat.
And, at a table in the back, still gesticulating and still high, the young man who had been confused in line was still talking loudly. It appeared that despite his argumentativeness, he did not want to leave. He had nowhere to go.
Other of the hooded men stayed to help put away the tables.
Margot was there until the end, still smiling and still chatting in a small circle. She walked around and collected salt shakers from the tables. She wanted to help. She went in and out of the kitchen. She wanted to be useful ... to be part of the hubbub.
“What can we get for you Margot?” asked one of the volunteers when she popped her had into the kitchen.
It was now 8:30 p.m. on a Thursday, just about the usual time for the weekend to get started.
But, I wasn’t quite feeling in the mood for the book party I was supposed to go to.
The crew in the kitchen worked to dry the pots and pans as they came out of the dishwasher. In chit-chatting with the forty-year-old woman who had been serving beef and mushrooms next to me, she told me that she comes to help out once a month. If I came back, she said, I should try to make it the third Thursday when she would be there.
No one ever asked me if I was a member of the church, or if I went to church at all. They simply thanked me and asked me if I might come back some time to lend a hand.
At the end of the two-hour shift, we tore off our plastic aprons and gathered our hefty coats, scarves, and hats from the lockers in the back room.
We all went back into the world, strangers again. Each of us had come to the soup kitchen on this night for different reasons. But knowing these people were out there on the Upper East Side, that they were there in that kitchen every week, made the world a better place.
The next day outside the Starbucks on Lexington Avenue at E. 87th St. when a feeble man held out a cup and asked for a coffee, my reaction was the same as it had been before I worked at the soup kitchen. I didn’t fork over any money. I didn’t make any small talk. I said no and kept walking.
But, this was not the same man who I had prepped salads with in the kitchen, who struggled to get the equation right. And he was not the man who looked me in the eye after a spoonful of peas went spinning onto his plate and said “God bless,” with piercing eyes.
At the kitchen, I had worked side-by-side with hungry people who had faces and names.
Would I be back next week? In all likelihood, no, probably not next week. But, I know it’s there. I know they can always use a few volunteers. And, at some point, I will be back. I could stand to be reminded of our humility and humanity sometimes, and to be reminded that on the rainiest days chances are, things could be much, much worse.
VOLUNTEER AT THE SOUP KITCHEN: Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church - 921 Madison Avenue (between 71st and 72nd streets); call 212-288-8920 to volunteer at the soup kitchen Thursdays 6:00p.m.-8:00p.m.
*The Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church is also currently in desperate need of adult volunteers for the overnight homeless shelter Monday through Friday. There are two volunteer shifts each night, an evening set-up shift from 6:00p.m.-8:00p.m. during which volunteers prepare an evening snack for the guests, welcome them, and oversee bed set-up and distribution of sheets; and, an overnight shift from 8:00p.m.-7:00 a.m. during which the volunteer supervises the shelter, stays in a different space, offers guests coffee and breakfast in the morning and supervises clean up. Volunteers who have not done anything like this before would be scheduled with a seasoned volunteer for training. Overnight volunteers can bring a friend. To volunteer overnight at the homeless shelter contact: Mike DeJoseph: mdejoseph@stjames.org or Jan Dietrich: joanmeow34@msn.com. |
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