Everytime I Walk Down a Street Now, Anywhere, I See, Inconspicuous and Unnoticed, Homeless People.
One young man was allowed to come into the pantry and take pretty much whatever he wanted when he shopped because he was so far in another world that we couldn’t communicate with him. This was a very sad situation for me. This young man, blonde, appeared to be in his late 20’s and had a beautiful face and demeanor. About the closest we could come to describing his hair was dreadlocks.
His mother also shopped at the pantry. Sometimes, when he was off his meds, he was just so far gone that we couldn’t talk with him. Somehow, she would get him back on the meds and he would be easier to communicate with. We went through these cycles with him. He would go along for several months on his medication and then quit taking it.
According to the National Institutes of Mental Health, 25 per cent of American adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder. These mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in our country according to the NIMH.
Research tells me that over 40% of the homeless population includes people with disabilities. My observations of shoppers in the pantry seems to confirm this statistic which I got from disabilityscoop.com.
The disabled homeless person appears to live below the poverty line.
That’s because those receiving SSI payments are really getting a very small amount of money each month. There’s just not enough money for a person to live on if s/he includes a rent payment. There’s also the employment factor for those with disabilities. There are fewer jobs and the jobs pay less. The old term “last hired, first fired” applies here.
The next post will include a copy of a letter to Nicholas Kristoff.
After that post, we’ll be returning to the pantry room with several posts about the pantry itself.
Thanks for reading this blogged book.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock
Not All Homeless People Sit On The Sidewalk With Signs And a Cup – Not In Woodstock, Anyway
It’s estimated that 10% of households visiting pantries are homeless. Most shelter clients have no other place to live. Many of them have jobs but simply don’t make enough to pay rent. It’s estimated that 24% of soup kitchen clients have no home.
Occasionally this gets a little complicated. One shopper came into the pantry as a homeless person. “I live in my car” he said. (How? Here it is February and the temperature goes below freezing every night).
“My wife is pregnant. We’ve got her in a women’s shelter. I’m working 2 jobs to get the money together for the baby.”
SHELTERED HOMELSSS are those living in a supervised publicly or privately operated shelter designated to provide temporary living arrangements (including shelters, transitional housing and hotels/motels paid for by charitable organizations or by Federal, State, or local Government programs.
UNSHELTERED HOMELESS are those individuals or families living with a primary nighttime residence that is a public or private place not designated for or ordinarily used as a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings including cars, parks, campgrounds, abandoned buildings, bridges, etc.
CHRONIC HOMELESS are those who have been homeless at least 4 times in the past three years. Or, they have been homeless for more than a year.
Thanks for reading this blog/book.
In the next few posts we’ll examine the plight of the mentally ill homeless persons.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Meet Woodstock’s Food Pantry – Part 3 – We Meet at Bread Alone
In the last post, I wrote about a Korean War Veteran.
The second man – tall, handsome, had a generous head of solid white wavy hair. He came up to me one day in Bread Alone.
“I want to shake your hand. I worked all my life. When I was laid off recently, I realized that I’m never going to work again. If it weren’t for your efforts in the pantry, I would be going hungry.”
George, while he had white hair, was not yet old enough for social security. So, he relied on unemployment, food stamps and the pantry. The hope in these cases is always that the unemployment insurance will last until the social security kicks in.
He was the first pantry shopper to speak to me outside the pantry. Such was the stigma of the pantry. I called it the “Shame Factor.” I began fighting this condition by going into Bread Alone every day and getting a cop of coffee. After a while, pantry shoppers began to say “hello.”
Hurray!
Bread Alone, the local coffee house, is owned by Dan Leader, a very upscale baker who bakes bread and pastries not only for Woodstock but all over New York.
Dan Leader and his family moved to Boiceville in 1983 to bake organic breads in a wood-fired oven. Five years later, Bread Alone included a café, a pastry room, and a cook book he wrote and published.
Bread Alone is visited by wealthy tourists and upscale residents. Pantry shoppers also visit Bread Alone in the mornings in Woodstock and sit around a table in the back enjoying the warmth of the room, the good coffee, a comfortable place to sit and talk.
Thank you for reading this post, this blogged book. I hope you are enjoying the story. The next post will be the last part in the section introducing the food pantry. This post will offer a peek at trouble brewing at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock
Bread
Meet Woodstock’s Food Pantry – Part 2 – A Shopper Touches My Heart and Soul
As the numbers escalated, I saw more and more hard working people struggling with the reality of not having any money for food after they bought the gas needed to get to a minimum wage job. I served people just laid off from a job who I knew would never work again. Seriously ill people came for food when they had no money left because every dime had gone to pay the medical bills. People came in traumatized when their homes were foreclosed or destroyed because of Hurricane Irene and Sandy.
For the most part, I accepted everyone as they presented themselves. Unless they were frightening to the volunteers, they were absolutely okay. In fact, I loved them all…even the aggressive ones.
Only 2 shoppers ever really “got to me”. I learned through these 2 men that there were weak spots in my shell after all.
The first was an older man who came into the pantry wearing a baseball cap which read “Korean War Veteran”. I simply could not then and cannot now come to terms with the fact that this man, who put his life on the line in the very brutal Korean conflict in the early 1950s is now, as an old man, reduced to standing in a food pantry line.
“Our country simply needs to have more respect for those we send to the front lines.” I could be heard muttering to any nearby volunteer after each of his visits. “Seeing this man just makes me want to take a pitchfork and head for Washington, D.C.” At the back of my mind was the realization that pantries throughout our country have not yet begun to really see the returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thank you for reading this post. It has been and continues to be an honor to serve the hungry.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
The Beginning – Part 3: Matthew Gives His Job Away
Hands down, the most enthusiastic congregation was St. John’s. They usually had 4-6 volunteers each week when it was their congregation’s turn and managed to get the most donated food. It helped that St. John’s had the largest congregation of all the churches in town. It also helped that Fr. George always came to the pantry when it was St. John’s turn and enthusiastically brought food.
The Coordinator of the Good Neighbor Food Pantry was Fr. Charlie’s partner, Matthew. Fr. Charlie, the priest at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, got a fancy new job in the Bloomington, Indiana, area.
One of the first things he and Matthew did, even before they spoke about the new job to the congregation, was get new wardrobes, new hairdos, put their houses on the market, and assign the job of pantry coordinator to me.
“Hi Thurman. Come over and sit by me tonight.” Matthew said as we ate the potluck supper after communion one Wednesday evening. Matthew had never, never, never asked me to sit by him. But, what did I know?
“I’d like you to be the next coordinator at the pantry. I have a box of files right here for you. It’s actually very easy. All you do is pass the key from one congregation to the next every month. I’ll call the Food Bank and give them your name.”
I was totally delighted! “Matthew, I’m flattered! Thank you for this opportunity. Do you have any advice for me?”
“Yes, actually, I do. Never give away the key. No matter what. Isn’t this quiche delicious?”
Thanks for reading this post. I hope you found the story so far to be interesting. Looking back on this whole story, I ask myself: If I’d known then what I know now, would I have been so flattered, so ready to say “Yes. Or would I have run off faster than Speedy Gonzalez?’
Then answer to my question is this: “I would’ve stood my ground.”
How Woodstock’s Food Pantry Fit Into This Beginning: Introduction – Part 2
From the start, it was fairly obvious that I was a poor match for the congregation. However, I kept going because of the pet thing. Soon I was volunteering at the local food pantry two months a year when it was St. Gregory’s turn. By 2008, the economy had tanked, the lines at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry were getting longer and Vicar Gigi was going around telling anyone who would listen that “Thurman is out of control over at the pantry” because of the number of people shopping at the pantry and the 3-day supply of food they were getting.
Good Neighbor Food Pantry opened in 1990 and served about two dozen people a week on Thursday mornings. The shoppers, mostly single homeless men, a few local colorful characters such as Jogger John, Rocky, and Grandfather Woodstock, and an occasional family would come into the pantry and pick up a box of cereal, a can of tuna fish, and a can of soup. Other things might be available but weren’t considered staples.
Only one shopper, Marie, focused on the other things. She loved to come in to the pantry and scarf up every “extra” on the shelves. She took the occasional jar of olives, cooking oil, sugar, salt…anything she could find.
Several congregations rotated the management of the pantry: St. John’s Roman Catholic Church, St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, Overlook Methodist Church, Shady Methodist Church, Christ Lutheran Church, Woodstock Jewish Congregation, Woodstock Reformed Church, and Palden Sakya.
Each congregation stocked the shelves with what their members donated and the shoppers got what they got. The congregations were content with the arrangement. They took their monthly turn twice yearly, brought in the food, found volunteers from the membership who sat in the pantry visiting with one another for two hours every Thursday morning while serving the hungry.
Thanks for visiting this blog and reading this post. I hope you found it informative and interesting. As the story unfolds in the next post, the “beginning” will move into the story itself. If you read a sentence, paragraph, or even an entire post that you feel is untrue, rest assured that this memoir/blog is very real. Everything written in every post actually happened. It’s my story.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
My True Story About a Woodstock Food Pantry Begins with Hatti Iles, Jay Wenk, and St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church – Introduction:Part 1
“When Bill Clinton left office, we had 31 million people in poverty and now we have 46 million.” – Peter Edelman
I’m going to get run out of town on a rail for telling this story and I don’t care. At my age, what difference does it make anyway? Every word of it’s true. I never could have made this one up in a million years. And, if someone sues…well, so what? Are they going to send a gray haired little old lady to jail? Well, if they do, I’ll just continue to write. I can’t get it all down in one book/blog anyway.
So, here goes. I’m starting at the beginning.
One September evening in 2005, I walked into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Woodstock, NY to hear Jay Wenk, a local activist hero speak. Jay Wenk is even older than I. He fought in World War II and is always up to something. He claims he’s an atheist and yet he’s one of the most spiritual men I’ve met in a long time. Funny about those old atheists. They go after a wrong like a duck on a June bug. He’d been picketing outside the Military Recruiter’s Office in Kingston because he didn’t like how the military recruiters were going after kids at the local high school before they even graduated. And, of course, he ended up in court for it. Jay’s not a pacifist. He just doesn’t approve of the government going after kids. Woodstock loves him for that.
When Jay Wenk has a court date, the room is usually filled with supporters. They also stand in the parking lot outside the court room picketing and otherwise making nuisances of themselves. It’s better than the movies.
So, anyway, he was at St. Gregory’s to give a talk.
I met someone else there: Hatti Iles, also a local celebrity. Hatti, an elegant lady and famous artist who has lived in Woodstock over 40 years, came to the talk and brought her pet dogs, Rupert, a poodle mix, and Willie, a Cairn terrier.
That was it for me. I hadn’t been in an Episcopal Church since 1958 and had long since forgotten how far away from the Episcopalian lens of life I had grown over the years. Never mind. Any church allowing me to take my pet to services had to have some good qualities. Right? I became a regular attendee along with Pork Chop, my 5-pound papillon.
Jay Wenk and Hatti Iles are both very important people in this book. But for them, none of the events I write about would ever have happened.
Thank you for reading this blog. In the next post, we’ll learn how a Woodstock food pantry fit into all of this.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
