Yesterday

Mom's little book of days for yesterday had some cryptic notes:

Property tax due

Frank 60

NOVEMBER 21

We have two ends with a common link
With one we sit, with one we think.
Success depends on what we use –
Heads we win…
Tails we loose.

It's a cute sentiment, but it contains one of my all-time pet peeves in English usage: the substitution of "loose" for "lose."

Yesterday was a very good day. I can't explain why; night before last was a rough one where I got up at about 3 or 4 to read for awhile. Sleep doesn't come very easily, partly because it's time to get a new mattress, and partly because I keep myself awake, thinking. So I didn't have a good day all planned out, but it turned out that way.

I've been backing up another agent all week, doing different kinds of tasks that kept me hopping from one thing to another, in addtion to all the other things I'm constantly juggling.  I likened my job to the old Ed Sullivan act where the guy had all these spinning plates balanced on flexible rods to somone yesterday, because that was the kind of day I was having. 

I went in early, with several goals in mind, not all work-related:

1. Walk out the door at 5pm so I could be at the Holy Moly food pantry distribution.
2. Sell as much Fannie May Candy as possible (annual church fundraiser)
3. Ride herd on a bunch of n00bs "helping" from an office in a different city, via IM
4. "QC" their records and try to keep them abreast of a format that changed since Monday
5. Keep up with new bookings for whatever groups came in from the new division
6. Keep up with changes from their admins, who are all "creatives," and get comfortable
7. Answer any and all questions, including those to which there is no answer
8. Monitor all the various queues for things that need to be done, fixed, questioned
9. Put in some time on some of my own work that has been put off this week
10. Try not to lose my cool when items 1-9 are all going on at once.

To my surprise, I had plenty of energy, was in good humor, hardly snapped at all, sold 6 or 8 more orders of candy, and at the end of the day, I walked out the door at 510pm. Not bad. It was an extremely productive day.

In the next week or so, though, my world is going to change. I'll go from a text-based reservations system to a completely graphical interface, and I noted glumly that my extremely fast typing speed (not to mention all the macro keys that make routine tasks thatmuchfaster will soon be rendered either irrelevant, or obsolete. It'll all be point-and-click, but from what I've seen, it's fairly cool IF the servers are behaving. But today, my mad SABRE skillz helped me catch up with my n00bs, my groups, my fellow agents, and everything else. Still, I was glad to be in the car, because there's always more things left undone than done. 

I drove to Holy Moly, where I found Bob, a fellow Bishop's Committee member, and Nancy, a long-time parishioner. They were discussing the impending closure calmly, Bob climbing on a chair in his old Western boots to find old records, while Nancy was combing through the files, looking for photos and old parishioner lists. Our current church secretary, Doreen, has been our only church secretary, and she saved everything, right from the beginning.

Bob is a raw-boned former Coloradan who also used to live in Utah; he and his wife Pat apparently attended the U of U about 40 years ago. Imagine, I was a kid then in Salt Lake.

Nancy has lived in the neighborhood since it was first built – in fact the whole "town" started as a subdivision built by Hoffman Homes. She was there from when the church was first started in a junior high gym, and so was Doreen, whose late husband John helped build the altar with boulders brought back from Kettle Moraine State Park (about which maybe the less said the better, I don't know if they actually had permission). Both Nancy's and Doreen's husbands currently reside in our columbarium, which will be transported to St Nicholas immediately after the closing Eucharist on December 31, and installed in the Baptistry. They both say they are all right with this difficult decision, but it's not like any of us have any choice. 

We're all a bit worried about Doreen. She's one of those bird-like British ladies that keep up appearances to the bitter end. She's one of the people to whom everyone defers when she says "it's always been done that way." The closure is hard for her.

There are other issues that we suspect are part of the background, dating back to the earliest years of both Holy Innocents and St Nicholas, which were both founded by one remarkable priest. He left Holy Innocents first, went full-time over there, and then two years later, left them as well to move on to an extremely well-funded inner-suburb parish, where he was rector for 33 years.

There was some bad feeling, apparently, over his leaving "us" for "them," but what our oldest members don't know is that he left "them" for a much more comfortable and financially secure position, as he had a family to support.

Nancy knows some of this story, and was filling us in on who was in some very old pictures we found. Then we started re-arranging the pantry in preparation for whatever visitors came our way.

We were ready to hand out fliers explaining the church closure, to let people know that the Supplemental Food Pantry would go on at St Nicholas… and that we'll be able to offer it twice a month instead of just once. Their recent food drive, of course, was very successful. I'm proud that our little informal "let's distribute bags, ask people to shop for the hungry, and see what we get back" program inspired them. We did a presentation on it at a diocesan meeting for small missions last winter, and the idea seemed to really captivate people… most of all, the delegation from St Nicholas, whose vicar we eventually ended up sharing after Fr. Ted left.

Which brings us back to the point, which is: feed the hungry. 

So I made hot water and brought up teabags and cups, hoping that we'd have a good turnout for our next-to-last distribution, but we were happy with the three people who came. There were two regulars (or groups of regulars) that we encouraged to load up on items, since we didn't want to have much left. One new lady came soon after Bishop's Warden Colleen came, and they were deep in conversation for a while. Bob and I chatted with the others and explained that we'll continue everything from Elk Grove. The one fellow was pretty sorry to hear we were closing, but brightened when he heard we were actually going to be closer to where he either lives or works. So we'll see him again.

I gleefully pointed out all the Cajun-style food to the last family, who've come before. As I suspected, they were from Louisiana and are probably in Illinois courtesy of Katrina.  

 Once everyone cleared out, we rearranged the stuff on the shelves a little and took stock for a while, both of our dwindling pantry items, and of our current situation at Holy Moly.

I checked in with one of the families that we helped out last Christmas – a couple of weeks ago I told the mom that they were the reason we started the supplemental food pantry, because we were caught empty-handed when they called looking for some help with groceries and Christmas toys. We had this simple idea – "why not have a small amount of non-perishable food on hand to give out when we get these calls?" and it went from there. This was because Colleen and I went a little crazy last year, shopping for them, making Christmas stockings, and hauling a ton of groceries over there… including a whole, frozen turkey. After that, yeah, we realized we had to get ourselves under control and come up with a simpler, less expensive plan. And wa-la, the "Grocery Bags for the Hungry" thing I put together was born.

It turns out that with a little encouragement from us this year, she's been turning things around and learning how to deal with problems with utilities and landlords. She may even be employed soon, we hope, now that she has a car. That seemed like a good note to end the call on.  

Bob brought out the pictures he found, and arranged them downstairs on a table so we can look at them next Sunday at Coffee Hour (oh, and also, tonight there was a Thanksgiving Liturgy at Holy Moly, but WORK kept me from attending).

The pictures are a little battered, but some of them are good quality and will be scanned. I was shocked to see how many kids there were in Sunday School only about 8 years ago! Colleen muttered darkly about the priest in the photo, the end of whose tenure marked the beginning of the decline in attendance. I don't know the story there; he seemed like a dynamic enough guy, but after he left, we apparently were rudderless too long, relied on supply priests too long, and  the good that our final two vicars Marion and Ted did were overshadowed by the big issue hanging over the whole Episcopal church, gay clergy, and accepting gay people in general as full members of the body of Christ. I came at the beginning of Marion's tenure, when there were a few children. Those families all drifted away in the last few months, when it became clear that the end was near, and that there would be a lot of unpleasant things to do for those who were there when the doors were finally closed.

It's a shame, really. We could use that energy now, but we'll regroup over at St Nick's.

After a long talk and a gander at old photos and newspapers, the four of us locked up and went home. I handed my packet of Fannie May sales receipts to Bob for his wife Pat, who faxed in the orders today. I felt pretty good about that, too. Having been given a couple of days' reprieve, I ended up selling about $345 worth. Which is not too shabby. I did tell people at work that it was a church fundraiser, that we were closing and merging, but the funds would help us with costs and to keep things like the Pantry going. 

We decided that we'd recommend we donate whatever food remains to the Schaumburg Food Pantry, and also make a bigger financial donation than we've been able to do in a long time. After January 1, we'll be concentrating on the Elk Grove pantry, but may keep ties with the Schaumburg one too. 

At the end of the day, I have to say that helping to feed hungry people did more for us in the last year than anything we've ever done in the previous 5 years. Those of us who are hanging in forget to feel sorry for ourselves when we're greeting someone who's hoping for a little help, and hoping to be treated with dignity and compassion. We tried to provide a welcome to all comers, of all orientations, to the best of our abilities, as small as we are. And I think we accomplished something good. 

I suppose that's why I was having such a good day — all day, I couldn't wait to get out of work so I could get over to Holy Moly to help hand out bags of food. I can forget my troubles and sorrows if I can help someone else have a little bit better life