Sunday, September 28, 2008

Serenity can be found in strange places

Today I made sandwiches to pass out to the hungry with a group at a church that does this twice a year. Other groups do it once a a year. (This was mentioned several times.) We also picked up containers of soup from a shelter to distribute. It smelled a lot like chili, prompting me to buy a small cup from Wendy's on the way home. At the first place we stopped, we could not give out seconds, for fear of running out and not being able to serve everyone, but at the second place we were able to (only 4 people got an extra soup though.) When one woman came back asking for a bag (meaning a plastic bag, which we didn't have) a man thought she was asking for another bag of sandwiches and offered to give his "seconds" to her. I told him she only wanted a plastic bag. "I'm looking for one of those, too!" he said. As we waited for more people to show up before passing out seconds, a woman in large SUV turned down the street going by the line. "ONE WAY STREET!" they screamed at the vehicle, which ignored them but turned safely at the traffic light.
When I typed this, I tried to think of some other way to begin the title, like "Snippets of..." but I didn't feel like using that, and somehow I began to think of the phrase "a slip of a girl," which did not seem to be indicated anywhere on this synonyms site, but someone made a song out of it and it was also referenced in an article. Before we delivered the food, the driver and another sandwich maker spoke of seeing eagles. He said that he thought bald eagles were originally called piebald. He also mentioned a piebald deer who comes into his yard. While we were waiting in his car (which was my old Taurus but bigger) at the hot food pickup, he kind of talked my ear off about deer hunting regulations and told me about Hunting for the Hungry. Later, I mentioned that my grandfather used to hunt deer. "Is there a way you could get some to him?" he asked.
I have friends who do not hunt but have learned those kinds of outdoor skills, and made use of them when a deer broke its leg on their parents' property and had to be shot. One said she sat by the deer after she died and meditated for a while and for her it was a spiritual experience. In the middle of February they threw an outdoor party in a very big tent which had a hole in the roof for a stove pipe, and served various dishes, including deer ribs which were wrapped in foil and cooked inside the woodstove.

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