LeslieMladinich.com

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Closing Time

N was a new volunteer at the Food Bank today, her first day was my last day. I had managed to cobble together two part-time positions into a bona-fide, albeit busy, full-time position. I would longer have time for volunteer work.

I wished I had been able to give two weeks’ notice. The last time I had worked with N at my 21-hour a week retail job during graduate school seven years ago, I was freelancing – pursuing my “dream.” I knew that my next adventure with the two part-time jobs wasn’t in the realm of a dream – I wasn’t really sure what it was.

However, we needed the paycheck and I thought combining each would get me closer to where I thought I should land. But I would have the most erratic schedule since the last time I worked with N.

I had already made two trips to the Bay Area scenes calendar by the table where fruits and vegetables were bagged to count how many weeks until a long break from both jobs arrived Thanksgiving week.

Can I remember signing my volunteer emergency contact form that Tuesday in May when I started the Food Bank?, I thought to myself as I counted the days on the calendar. Between that time and today, I would be half-way into October.

Meanwhile, N had introduced herself to another long-time volunteer.

“How is it being retired?” said the long-time volunteer. “Are you like me and look at a blank day and want to cry, like… every day?

“Yes,” N said, “It will be three o’clock and I just won’t know what to do with myself.”

I came to the Food Bank not quite knowing what to do with myself either, emotionally and physically worn after what was supposed to have been a successful transition into corporate communications from teaching and journalism.

There were some Food Bank shifts where I would replay all the drama of my last job through my head. Stacking in blurs, the comforting tediousness of the motion could suddenly transform into a mind haze of questions and replay – Could I have done better?  Why wasn’t I tough enough? Wasn’t that a bitchy thing she said to me that day?

As the two volunteers chattered on about methods of keeping oneself busy in retirement, envy crept up my neck. These women were of a generation where school pensions and good health enabled them a new life after 55. N was still young enough to stretch her body like a cat over sheets of fruit cocktail cans, lift a lithe leg up to get extra mileage from her reach, and place a fashionable suede tennis shoe back on the floor without a creak.

I knew I wouldn’t be like them – that most people my age, unless they got very lucky, would have to work with their muscles sore.

Yet working at the Food Bank gave me a glimpse that there was a place for me. I cared about the mission, I was fascinated by the food distribution and the equity, and I was strangely comforted that it wasn’t unlike other workplaces: volunteers snapped when they had bad days and gossiped about each other, delegated jobs they didn’t want to do to others and when clients were waiting they hustled.

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Day 9- Analysis Paralysis

Photo Credit: Bjorn Fran Tjorn

The altruistic adrenaline that propelled me during my first two months volunteering at the Food Bank hasn’t been tamped down so far that I don’t look forward to my Wednesday shift, but this week really felt like work.

We got what I thought was the biggest and most confusing Trader Joe’s delivery so far – boxes filled to the brim with so many items – some staples, others exotic- that it made me question whether people had stopped shopping there for a few weeks.

I was put in charge of getting most of it out and onto the tables for clients to choose from or stored in back stock. We were short on volunteers and the paid staff members had to leave for a meeting across town.

Two people, 12 boxes and a swirl of questions. Among them:

• Do clients really want plastic boxes of Chinese pea shoots?
• Why is the new volunteer going so much faster than me?
• What to do with 20 packages of spiced stir-fry Asian vegetables, a hybrid of loose produce placed in boxes and ready-made salads that chill on ice while the clients shop?
• How stupid was I to wear a brand-new blush colored T-shirt, now bloodied with raspberry juice leaking from broken cartons?

Even at the Food Bank, I sometimes encounter the question I used to encounter  in my day-to-day “real job” when there was too much to do tainted by shades of confusion:

Where to start?

Even this summer without a 40 + hour week job I have this. Whether it’s trying to get the perfect lead on an article before I know what I am really writing about, determining whether I should put a lot or little effort into a cover letter based on my qualifications and the laundry list of the “the ideal candidate,” or if the garden first needs weeding or watering, it’s a disturbing stall.

At the Food Bank it’s worse as the pace is fast, and it often goes hand-in-hand with food classification.

For example, we got a surfeit of chives that were just starting to go this side of slime. Because they were cylinder-shaped and small, and I assumed most clients didn’t know what to do with them, would they go with other produce I assumed most clients didn’t know what to do with – small, hook-shaped Japanese eggplant?

I decided to move onto something easier as I considered the chives’ placement. The purple frosted Champagne grapes, not much bigger than caviar, could go into a box with other fruit clients would eat in bunches instead of in one piece, but they weren’t as filling as the plump green table kind, so did they really belong with cherries?

This over-analysis had delayed me from filling cans for the Family Boxes at other times too.

Manwich mix has no meat in it, but what is it really?

“It’s tomato-based,” the program manager pointed out, “so put it with the tomatoes.”

But is it as versatile as a can of diced ones, which could be used in stews, pasta sauces, or sprinkled over a quesadilla?, I thought as I twirled the can in my hand.

I could ask questions of the very busy skeleton staff, but I like to problem-solve myself.

My internal manager, when I want to quiet her over an article, job description or weeding, can go chill on the patio with a glass of Rosé and a magazine when she gets too loud and if she isn’t too pressed for time. But here and now, the new volunteer was looking to me for the answers amidst the strewn boxes.

Some of the more seasoned volunteers say just dive right in and don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

“It’s not like they are going to dock your paycheck,” some volunteers will laugh.

But I always want to do things right the first time.

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Day 6 and 7 Supply and Demand

My food bank client, stooping over the table, eagle-eyed a box of apricots and nectarines.

“How many of these did you say I could have?,” she asked

“One,” I said.

Today was my first day “working the line,” which in Food Bank parlance means giving out perishables- fresh produce, yogurt and milk, pre-made salads, wedges of cheese, pies, muffins, and cakes on a limited basis.

The program manager did the run-through every day as to how much we could give out from each section. The experienced “liners” made it easy by placing citrus with citrus (lemons with oranges) and apples with apples (Pink Ladies mixed with McIntoshes) so calculations among type were standard.

But then there were always limited selections of exotic produce that didn’t have a logical place for display. This is where strategic merchandising, like in any retail store, kicked in.

“Move those three eggplants from the box with the corn to the box with the  fennel,” said the program manager as clients leaned against the heavy warehouse until we open for business. “If you give them a choice of corn or eggplant, the eggplant will never go.”

After the line had been shopped and amounts of items sat or went quickly, volunteers had to reset guidelines by a loose but logical process.

Volunteers would take a glance at how many pieces of fruit were left in a box and measure how flush we were in, let’s say- bananas.  For example, if we only had a half box full of pale yellow green bananas left in an hour, clients were allotted two. But since we had two full boxes of riper ones pockmarked with dark chocolate-colored dots and they weren’t moving, the clients could take four.

It often took some quick judgment calls. One of my clients was more attracted to the smaller and more munificent plums, so I let her take two to make up for her not taking a larger one.

The amounts clients were allowed to take also changed midstream if we got a surprise delivery. An allotment of two nectarines could be changed to four in an instant if our bounty increased.

The client’s bubblegum short-taloned nails tickled over the apricots and nectarines. Because she was having a hard time reaching over, I offered one to her.

She looked at it and frowned.

“I don’t want this one. It’s mushy. Sorry to be so picky,” she said.

“Why not be?” I said.

The client’s “sorry to be so picky” qualifier brought up the argument that if clients were getting something for free, they should be grateful with what they were getting. I had heard this argument swirling around the Food Bank.

But I believe they should be just as picky as if they were paying money – or maybe even more so. The apricot she is trying to find may be the only one she has all week- so why shouldn’t it be pristine?

With bending the rules also comes some second guessing.

My co-volunteer overheard a client talking about a family birthday party they had coming up.

“For that reason, you get two pies instead of one,” said the volunteer.

I was the dessert monitorer on this line with this dispensation. So when the couple came to survey the lemon breads, bran muffins, and three varieties of fruit pies, I was confused.

Did this mean that they got a pie and a box of muffins, or two pies and another selection?

The client started taking two pies when I noticed she had also taken a package of chocolate mini lava cakes.

“Sorry, you can only have one pie because of the mini-cakes.”

“Oh, ” she said somewhat embarrassed. “Okay,” and she put one pie back.

I am still not sure if I did the right thing.