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cracks in the charity
Tuesday, December 23 2008
Last year I went with Penny and David to the Methodist church on Clinton Street in Kingston to help with their yearly Christmas Eve party, part of whose purpose is to feed the hungry and downtrodden. This year I'd agreed to help out again. Meanwhile, David's involvement seems to have increased. He'd called around and found leftover produce as well as a restaurant willing to prepare it. And today he'd arranged with me to help transport boxes of it from the farm stand (a place in Stone Ridge) to the restaurant (on Route 28 on the way towards West Hurley).
The charity displayed in today's errands wasn't as interesting as the little cracks providing a view to the complex human feelings that underlay it. At the farm stand, for example, we had a Dominican guy being very helpful with the locating and boxing of produce, but when we were all done he made a few comments about the people who would be eating the food that suggested he didn't have any empathy for them at all. He called them "crackheads" and accused them of being lazy for "not getting a job." Later, as we were dropping off food at the restaurant, the guy there seemed to be in a terrible mood and irritated by the suddenly-palpable reality of what he'd agreed to do. David thought perhaps he was stressed out because of the tanking economy.
Back at the house, I pieced together a complex wooden structure to support the windows that will form the wall of the wedge-shaped space next to the greenhouse's door. There's a 17 inch wide void between the large panes of sloped glass (to the west) and the door (to the east), and I want to make the headroom in this space rise higher than the glass so as to minimize the chance of bonked heads. This makes for a rather challenging carpentry puzzle, but it's one I'm enjoying solving. Much of the fun of working on projects comes from figuring out how to work around fuckups in your design (or lack thereof). In this case the fuckup was locating the door too far south, allowing a big corner of it to rise above the level of the sloping wall of glass that mostly defines the greenhouse's southern wall.
At some point David, who had been working at the Methodist Church, stopped by and I gave him a tour of the greenhouse, a glass of Yellowtail Cabernet Sauvignon, and some leftover crockpot chili with knock-off Stewart's brand Fritos.
As an indication of how precarious the current American and/or world financial predicament is, read this interesting post on the Huffington Post. The jist is that what little life our economy now has is the result of people foolishly holding onto houses that it would be in their best interest to abandon. That's Bubonic-Plague-level fucked up!
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?081223 feedback
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