Scribe-ls

The brown bag printed with the National Association of Mail Carriers logo and instructions for joining in their food drive on May 10 sat on my counter all week, being moved here and there for food prep and cleanup.  I'd look at it sometimes balefully, thinking, yeah, right, load up the bag!  As if I'm not spending enough!  As if we're not cutting back!  Yet, I couldn't bring myself to throw it out and kept shuffling it from here to there. 

Hearing an interview with a food bank user on NPR yesterday didn't help my ambivalence at all.  In their effort to illustrate the effects of the economy on the middle class by interviewing a middle-class mother using a food bank in Iowa, they instead gave me yet another reason to feel disgust with my "classmates" and hesitate in sharing.  The words of  the woman interviewed impressed me that she was using the food bank to supplement groceries so she wouldn't have to spend so much on food and inconvenience a two-income lifestyle now challenged by the recession, not to supplement otherwise insufficient food to adequately feed her family.  It made me angry.  When I give food that I buy with my hard-earned money (sometimes stripping my own pantry of back-ups) to the food bank, I am expecting that it will feed people who would otherwise go hungry, not somebody who doesn't want to give up non-necessities like sports for the kids, movies, cable TV, professional haircuts, soft drinks, and so forth. 

So I stood in front of my pantry this morning, thinking about that interview and feeling quite a bit grumpy about the whole idea of setting out my back-ups for the mail carriers' drive.  I went and picked up the bag, thinking to throw it out or use it to stack newspapers for recycling, but simply could not do either.  In spite of the jerks out there abusing the food banks, there are many more people who do truly need the food and my not giving will make the impact of the jerks all the worse.  Thin, wan mothers who feed the kids first.  Old men with $25 left over out of their pension after paying rent and medical costs.  Teens with addict parents.  So, into the bag went most of my backups and a heartfelt prayer for the well-being of whoever gets them and the mail carrier who will deliver them.