soup kitchen

was walking on 15th btwn 5th and 6th and passed this long line of wretched looking people and asked one what he was waiting for. in the basement of St. something xavier church there's a cavernous, massive room where around 1300 meals get served every sunday around lunch time. it's almost all black people and almost all men. it's kind of upsetting seeing somebody eat that hungrily, somehow way more upsetting than just seeing a horrifically thin, obviously starving person. it's like watching some very intimate medical procedure or, just, seeing someone so totally oblivious and engrossed in the business of staying alive. it feels wrong to see someone that passionately preoccupied.

there was fish on rice and a little salad that no one ate. a nearly presentable woman, given away by the stress in her face and hairless brows with little cuts where the hair should be, went around to trays about to be dumped to shovel their salad into her tupperware. there was a cookie and some juice and ample bread and oranges, most with splotches of green because they weren't really ripe.

it's funny how wearing castoffs one ends up looking like a very badly dressed teenager. lots of sneakers and there was an i [heart] haters hat. people had funny ideas about health: one guy sent me to get him more juice explaining that he had asthma and his doctor told him that juice was good. it was so nice to be helpful, to be thanked. my job was to be a busboy for the hall, grabbing trays when people were finished. the hall smelled quite bad. some people were pretty much passed out over their trays. it was all very matter of fact, it didn't "stink of charity" the way this kind of thing apparently used to back in orwell's day. people were super, super courteous, on the whole.

people loved the juice and cookies. how strange and horrible to see people loving, needing sugar in that most simple way, these adults. and there was socializing, lotta talk about sports, and some people who just really needed to talk, but it was very very weird to have it be all about the food. these people have been made like no one i have ever known by poverty.