Getting Involved : How We Can Benefit Through Simple Acts
“Don’t go in there!” the neighbor cried, as I approached my first drop-off location, balancing a brown lunch bag atop a very hot container of food.
“She died several days ago.”
The neighbor had evidently been standing watch, waiting for our arrival so she could share the shocking news with us.
She glanced nervously at the small, one-story house where the woman had lived. I stared back and mumbled my condolences. The neighbor seemed to want to spare me the possibility of intruding on sacred ground or facing some ghostly apparition.
This was not an auspicious start on my first day as a Meals-on-Wheels volunteer. Mrs. Crane, not her real name, had been receiving the low-cost, hand-delivered meals to her home for years, I’m told.
She had been one of 11 men and women on my delivery list this day who, because of age or illness, could no longer cook their own meals, shop, drive or do the myriad other simple acts most of us take for granted. No further examples were needed to show me the tenuous hold they have on life.
For some, a Meals-on-Wheels visitor is the only face they see all day, which explained the joyful greetings I received from most recipients. Unfortunately, there was no time to chat, since others were waiting for their food.
Dorothy, the day’s driver, and I didn’t have to travel far to find these men and women. They are peppered throughout our neighborhoods, hidden in tiny, cramped apartments, back alley walk-ups, houses that in days past were homes, not prisons.
One man greets me with a grunt and a nod, dressed in his undershorts, bathrobe and socks. I am only a delivery girl to him. Fine. I didn’t volunteer for the applause. But I’m concerned about his apparent lack of self-esteem.
The message he appeared to be sending was, “No one cares about ‘em, so why should I care about me?”
A former child star greets me with a hearty handshake. His wizened yet cherubic face breaks into a wide impish grin.
A woman in a wheelchair peers out her screen door at me, smiles, then struggles to open the door. Others beckon me inside, their eyes glued to the friendly faces on their television screens.
We’ve completed our route and in that brief hour, I’ve contemplated the nature of existence; the state of aging; falling from grace; falling into dependency; how long life is; how short life is; and, how, through simple acts, we can give and receive so much.
Meals on Wheels always needs volunteer deliverers and drivers. In Culver City / Palms / West L.A., call (310) 559-0666. In Santa Monica, (310) 394-5133. In Westwood, (310) 208-3439.