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Christmas Eve charity, 2008
Wednesday, December 24 2008
Today on the way to help out at the Methodist Church on Clinton Street in Kingston, I stopped at that restaurant on Route 28 to pick up whatever the folks there had made. I was astounded to find they'd prepared six huge trays of food, using lots of materials in addition to those we'd dropped off. As we were loading these into my car, the guy there said, "I put some pork in one of the dishes, I hope that's alright. Nobody told me not to!" "It's fine!" I said. He must have seen all the hardcore vegetarian bumperstickers on the car, which is normally driven by Gretchen.
This unexpected bounty was well-received by David at the church, who attributed it to guilt about the unpleasant reception we'd received yesterday.
At the church, I busied myself with whatever small jobs came my way: the chopping of peppers, the bisecting of Brussel sprouts, and (when there was nothing else to do) the honing of a very dull knife. Periodically others would show up and do things like tell Methodist-friendly jokes (these were horrible) or talk about all the good they've been doing for the church. Self congratulation seemed to be biggest among precisely those who stood around doing the least. Meanwhile the hard-working cook enjoyed telling anyone who would listen about his numerous medical problems.
Eventually Penny came back from wherever she was and that was good because she wasn't going to tell me about any medical problem more severe than "laughing so hard I pissed my pants."
Last year the service had been held after dinner, which had been problematic because people, not being either enslaved or employed, were free to leave, which lots of them did before getting their dose of God. This year services came before dinner, but because they began before many people had arrived, it didn't seem to have its desired effect.
In the end about seventy people showed for tonight's meal, which was less than we'd seen last year. David had thought the ongoing World Depression II would bring more people, but this factor was counterbalanced by the weather, which was had turned the seemingly-unplowed streets of this part of Kingston into a greyish soup of slush.
When grace had been said and people lined up for food, my place in the line was the buttering of bread. The bread, by the way, was whole wheat, and I expected this to scare off a lot of those more familiar with the white kind, but it turned out that the only people who didn't want any were children.
With such a marginal crowd, one expects aggression and black hole conversations, and tonight was no exception. David found himself having to talk someone down about his peas.
After dinner, the volunteers ate, and it was a good thing none of us were vegetarians. Meat was in nearly everything, as that seems to be how the world operates outside the confines of Gretchen's preferred eating haunts.
As we cleaned up afterwards, I was horrified by the huge volume of food simply being thrown away. Surely there was a better destination for it than a landfill. I might have recommended it as pig slops for a farm animal sanctuary, but a good fraction of it was ham, and I doubt farm animal sanctuaries want to be promoting canibalism. Another use might be the production of some sort of carbon-based fuel source, and if I had to live around such waste more than once a year I'd surely research the options in detail.
From all that was being thrown away, I managed to salvage a large box of carrots and a good number of apples, both of which I might be able to ferment into something that I can later distill. David and I keep talking about making a little still for domestic booze production, but we've never done it yet. (I used to distill cooking sherry into a very potent white lightning back when I was in college, so I know it isn't difficult if one has access to an easy heat source, as anyone with a woodstove does.)
Afterwards, Penny, David, and I reconvened at Snapper Magee's, Kingston's cozy punk rock dive bar. We'd been there for about a half a drink before Penny and David's recurring friend Orgy showed up. Orgy has a new girlfriend named Gabrielle and she seemed fun (although Penny has occasionally been irritated by her Feng Shui extremism). They were hungry, so they headed off to the "Japanese" place on the corner of Washington and Lucas, where we later met them. It was after that restaurant's closing time, a closing time its staff is unapologetic in enforcing. But they had no problem letting us in once we said we were just there to visit some of their patrons.
The party continued at our house. I stoked the fire, Gretchen brought out some of the cupcakes she'd been baking during a day-long jihad, and it wasn't long before all six of us were walking around holding glasses of Jameson. (By the end of the evening, the liter bottle, which had been more than half-full, was empty.) It being an appropriate crowd, for the first time in many months I found myself going off to find my small bag of marijuana. Somehow, though, I'd misplaced my copper-pipe parapharnalia and was forced to build a new pipe from scratch. It drew all its components from my extensive library of brass fittings, looking in the end like those redneck pipes I remember from the back of the bus in high school (a time and place lacking access to head shops).
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