Plastic Utensils
June 2023
By Guest Writer Susan Dvorak*
During a recent discussion I had with Tom Cooper, we reflected upon the tendency people have, myself included, to focus our giving and outreach to our neighbor in the season of Christmas. This conversation made me view the story I’d written, about Christmas back in 2010, in a new light. What if we were as mindful of “giving” in June, or in August? Imagine what that shift could mean for our communities, our city, our country.
All of this is motivated by a question posed in Scripture to each one of us:
But the man was anxious to justify himself so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Luke 10: 29
The streets of downtown eastside Vancouver were completely deserted just before nine o'clock Christmas morning. We were on our way to volunteer at "The Door Is Open" day shelter on East Cordova St. where patrons are served a hot meal on Christmas day.
We arrived to an onslaught of sight and sound. The lunch room was crowded with long tables, each covered in bright red and green tablecloths and neatly surrounded by plastic lawn chairs. Gold tinsel looped across the ceiling and strings of Christmas lights flashed along the walls. Dozens of volunteers moved about purposefully, carrying boxes and trays, filling the kitchen and jammed in a side storage room. We felt awkward and in the way.
A smiley young woman stopped and offered to find us assignments. Taken upstairs, to back rooms, we found volunteers making sandwiches and packaging desserts for the hundreds of bagged lunches to be distributed in the city that day. Our three teenagers were placed on the sandwich-assembly crew and the rest of us led back down to the small storage room. There our younger girls joined a relay of volunteers putting items brought from the upstairs "lunch rooms" into plastic bags. Our nine year old son was the unlikely person asked to tally the number of completed lunch bags being placed into boxes. My husband, supervising that tallying, helped carry the boxes full of lunches to vans waiting in the back alley.
I was wondering what to do when a volunteer accidentally dropped a huge tray of potatoes and gravy near the kitchen serving window. He stood horrified. I quickly offered to clean up, happy to be useful. This was like a familiar mealtime mishap at home, except for my being cheerful about it.
At 10:30 the lineup of guests began to shuffle in. They were of all nationalities, dressed for the outdoors, many elderly, a surprising number of them couples. Most were quiet and polite, a few chatty and outgoing, fewer still brusque or obviously unwell. Many patrons responded in kind to greetings of "Merry Christmas" with a smile while others avoided any exchange.
Volunteers poured into the lunch room to help with greeting, food service and clear-away. My kids helped or stood shyly against the walls. I felt a pang watching a middle aged man carefully spoon his meal into a clean yogurt container. A regular volunteer greeted guests loudly, some by name, bustling around like a maître d’. These people so often overlooked were today the guests of honour and this man was intent on being their host.
Across the crowded room I noticed an elderly gentleman, wearing layers of coats, sitting motionless at the end of a table, a plate full of food in front of him. I wondered why he wasn’t eating, just sitting still, staring ahead.
My nine year old son leaning beside me suddenly straightened up, and walked off, making his way around the room to a box full of napkin-wrapped plastic utensils. He took a set and continued around to where the man sat.
My son held the utensils straight out at the man in the unadorned gesture of a boy. The old man stared at them a moment, took the utensils, unwrapped them, and slowly began to eat. My son walked back around toward me with a satisfied look on his face.
The room swam through my tears. Maybe I was just tired, or maybe the moment was as beautiful as it seemed. This simple act was at the heart of the charity we all desired to extend that day, stripped down and pure. Imagine that we all might see each other so clearly and provide for each other so practically, plainly, intently.
I stood there in that crazy space feeling that all of us were truly together, the gravy-dropper, the polite rumpled guests, my young daughter almost fainting in the lunch relay room, the old man waiting for utensils, the rambunctious Filipino choir, the man with the clean yogurt container, the head volunteer, all together under the tinsel.
Though a gulf seems to divide our lives, at that moment I felt how little it is that separates us.
Sue
*Sue Dvorak has worked as a physiotherapist, a church and community volunteer, a board member, and mostly, as a mother. She and her husband Marcel live in Vancouver along with various combinations of their six young adult children.