the pink politic

Goodbye, Tony

Andrew and I volunteered yesterday to help in the monthly soup kitchen at the church we attend. I'd done some volunteer work before - children's hospital, community cleanups, etc. - but this was a new experience.

When we arrived at the church basement at 11:30am to help prep for the noon meal, there was already a line of people waiting at the door. Downstairs, we were confronted with plastic aprons, hairnets (eek!), latex gloves and name tags. In the kitchen, middle-aged women and teenage boys were preparing huge pots of sliced ham, sweet potatoes and green beans. The salads were ready and other volunteers sliced store-bought apple pies. (We later discovered suspicious green dots on the crust of some of the pie slices and decided against serving those pieces.) An elderly black gentleman dressed in his Sunday best, a brown suit and tie, introduced himself as Mr. Thomas. He poured apple juice into dozens of paper cups.

Because we lacked in the volunteer department, Andrew and I were each responsible for our own table. I served an elderly woman with crossed eyes who spoke only Spanish, a man who read the New York Times and listened to music on an MP3 player as he ate, a man who silently refused to eat anything and pawned off his plate on an obese woman at the next table, and a young man who came to the kitchen to thank me before he left.

But the most memorable of my patrons yesterday was Tony, a 75-year-old wearing dark sunglasses, who came in just as the crowds were dying down. I got him his food and found myself with nothing else to do, so Andrew and I decided to sit down with Tony. We hated the sight of someone eating alone. I wasn't sure if we were intruding or not, but I stopped worrying when Tony began offering up his life story in broken English. Born in Puerto Rico he came to New York in his 30s and spent the past 40-something years on the west side of Manhattan between 93rd and 133rd Streets, a stretch that encompasses the tail end of the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights (home of Columbia University) and Harlem. Tony told us he'd worked as a dishwasher and played the drums in a band. Then Tony removed the dark sunglasses he'd been wearing to reveal a black eye and face full of broken blood vessels. Tony said he was an alcoholic 5 months clean and the injury was from his rougher days. He was close to sobbing when he described becoming addicted to alcohol, but laughed when he told us that his granddaughter was recently arrested for marijuana. Perhaps embarrassed by his honesty, Tony hurried out of the church basement, hobbling along on his cane, without saying goodbye.

posted by Tina @ 8:56 PM