Tammy has got a beautiful post up today on Stone Soup which is a book I didn't discover until young adulthood but have managed to obtain multiple copies over the years. Stone Soup is a story about creating abundance out of scarcity, about cooperation even in the case where maybe we don't care directly - or we are so focused on ourselves that we believe we have nothing to give.
I live in an incredibly wealthy community. I cannot stress enough what I mean by these words. In my small town of approximately 8,600 souls and maybe 2,500 families a 5,000 square foot home is modest and not much is thought about 10,000 feet and above. My 2,200 square foot Ranch is considered a shack.
I didn't move here to hobnob with the newly wealthy. I moved here for the space and the schools and I wasn't paying attention to the changes that occurred in the 20 years since I last lived in what used to be a farming and horse community. I'm still not sure how big a mistake I may or may not have made. I have conversations with my seven year old where I find myself consistently redirecting her observations from 'we live in a tiny house' to 'we live in exactly what we need and only what we need and even what we have is more than our share'. That's hard to digest when she visits her best friend's house. Cletus at sixteen does just fine.
Not everyone in my town has a lot of money. Not everyone in my town has enough to eat. We do not discuss this. As a matter of fact, we don't even look at it. Part of this is our elderly population. They paid $10,000 for their homes forty years ago and now pay nearly twice that in taxes. They don't have it. The other side of our poverty are families with young children. Given that we don't have any legal rentals you'd be quick to think that's not possible. It's more than possible, it's quite real.
Now, poverty is subjective but I define it within my current environment as not having the funds to heat your house or feed your children or keep the lights on or have a roof at all. Anything else is cream. I know, harsh, right? I also believe that poverty is entirely unnecessary. But I have a story; it wanders a bit, bear with me.
About 18 months ago one of Little Girl's day care providers was forced to take short term disability to recover from a significant illness. I believe that she went without pay for six weeks or more. This day care provider is part of the dwindling supply of town families who do not live in large houses, do not make great sums of money and often do live paycheck to paycheck. Six weeks without pay can be devastating depending on how close to the bone you live.
An anonymous collection was taken up to help the daycare provider. No amounts too large or too small, everything dumped in the secret box to be collected and passed on by the Director. We wrote a check for what we thought might be a week's salary hoping that maybe five or six other families might do the same. Or maybe half that, or maybe a day. It's not like we don't have it, right?
Here's what happened. Everybody else dropped checks for about $25 into the box and then everybody talked. Somebody was so scandalized, and yes, that's the word I mean, by what we'd done that we were publicly humiliated for 'throwing our money around.' I am still embarrassed. It's one of the reasons we pulled Little Girl out of day care and hired the nanny. Eventually the neighbor across the street stopped saying mean things to us directly and things settled down.
In the mean time, our town ladies want to raise $300,000 for new theater seats for the high school auditorium. The old seats are 40 years old and boy are they comfy! We sure did know how to make theater seats 40 years ago! So anyway, they want to rip them out and put in new red velvet seats but our school budget doesn't have enough money because we've already allocated 1.8 million to the rest of the theater overhaul. So we're fund raising, right? $50 is the minimum donation, $200 gets your name on a little brick. $2,000 and up would be most seriously appreciated. I refused to give them any money on the grounds that I can't bear the thought of all those comfy seats in a landfill.
During Cletus's last concert we were asked, by public show of hands (by the choir director) to raise our hands if we had donated yet to the seat foundation. I did not raise my hand. I might have been the only person who did not raise my hand. My daughter was humiliated, I folded and asked my husband to write a check. I felt filthy.
Here's the really windy part.
While we were away there was an article in the local paper. I think it was on the front page. There is a photograph of a woman pushing a load of firewood donated to her family by the Kiwanis Club. It's how she heats her house. Her family's in deep shit. Seriously. We have a food pantry, not many people put food in it. It is often quite empty.
We missed the article but we got the email from one of Little Girl's room mothers. They were collecting again; a lot like the day care provider. We got a gift card at Whole Foods for one week of groceries and we sent it in with Little Girl as instructed. It was meant to be anonymous.
We got a phone call last night. The phone call was from the room mother who collected the money from the other parents. Our grocery card was equal to the sum of all other donations.
How much does that suck in a town with this much money?
In any event, she was very nice about it, just stunned. And she wanted permission to tell the woman where it came from. We reluctantly agreed because the reason the woman allowed the article to be written in the first place was to draw attention to what is occurring around us. I think it is better to be anonymous because then you don't risk anyone's pride or it's not about you, or something like that - I'm having trouble with all this.
Today, at work, my cell phone rang. I didn't recognize the number and normally I would not have answered but I did anyway and it was this woman. She called to tell me what happened. Everybody has a story, right? She needed to tell the story. After she told the story she asked me what she should do with the money because other people were hungry too. I told her that it was her money and entirely her decision. She said she thought about maybe keeping $50 of it and giving the rest to the food pantry. I said she should do what was right for her, that I just wanted to help. In the end she said she would give the whole thing to the food pantry; an equitable distribution to all. She wanted to know if she could print my name in the paper, that maybe other people would step up. I said OK because she asked me to and how the hell do you say no to somebody brave enough to put herself on the front page of the paper (and they snub her in town now too) and I didn't really mean it but I'll do it.
I don't want to be stoned on my front lawn for doing something so crass as to make somebody look past their red velvet theater chairs.
So back to the Stone Soup that Tammy made with her child (it looks really yummy too, rock and all). Call me a screaming idealist, but what if, with every weekly grocery purchase 10% of the grocery bill went to the food pantry shelf? How hard would that be? Or a windfall of carrots (stolen from CG's cake of course), or those extra tomatoes or greens or what have you? What if?
Really, people, how hard can this be? Please don't answer that. I cried into my keyboard for twenty minutes.
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