I got up today and followed the directions I'd been given by the woman I'd talked to yesterday. The shelter was on a street one block off of what seemed to be a main street of some kind in Akron. I really wasn't sure what to expect... you see all these stories on television about "victims of abuse" and you wonder if the entire afternoon is going to look like outtakes from C.O.P.S. or something.
Nothing of the sort, really. They had a fairly large room that seemed to be a central meeting area. If I had to guess, I'd say the building used to be fairly large furniture store that had been remodeled several times and was now several floors of rooms, offices, a kitchen area and this larger open area. I was surprised how well-equipped it was. They told me that the State of Ohio gives them money to operate but they also accept donations. For Thanksgiving, a local business had donated a lot of food and supplies, so they were pretty well set.
I got there about ten, and the first thing they asked me to help with was setting up about two dozen folding tables that had been lent by a rental center. They also had a bunch of chairs, and we set them all up and unrolled paper tablecloth material over them. A couple of the women who were staying in the shelter talked to me while we were doing all this, and I listened a lot more than I talked. One of them, a woman named Colette, who I had figured was maybe 40 actually said she was 26. She had three fairly young children, who were upstairs watching the parades on this old television in one of the larger rooms. To say that she was aged beyond her time was an understatement. She had packed her children up two weeks earlier and brought them here when her current boyfriend, in whose apartment they had been living, got pretty drunk over a weekend and threw them all out. She didn't say anything about whether he'd been violent to any of them, but I kind of got the impression that that was the case.
One thing they had no shortage of was volunteer help. There were even a few men there helping, which surprised me a little. The impression I'd had was that men wouldn't necessarily be welcome, but from the ease with which these guys lent a hand and moved around, I assumed that they had been involved with the shelter for some time and were entirely accepted.
Television really can screw up your expectations of the real planet that's out here.
Anyway, they were right, the task of cooking a lot of food was pretty well under control. An older black man named Ben and his wife Ella were ruling the kitchen and right around 2:00 or 2:15 we started assembling people together and bringing dishes and plates in and out, loading them up. I looked around as the tables filled up, some with people from upstairs in the shelter, and still other people who seemed to be coming in off the street, and took a quick survey. It seemed to be about half black, almost half white, some Hispanic women and children, one woman who looked to be Vietnamese or something. A lot of children. Maybe it seemed like a lot because I'm rarely around them. Ages of the women ranged from maybe 19 or 20 (my guess) to maybe 55 (my bad guess) with the majority seeming to be in their mid or late 20s or early 30s. In other words, my age was a rough median.
When we had people pretty well sat down and settled down (children notwithstanding) someone got up and sort of hushed the room for some sort of prayer.
What do you do when that happens? I've never really known the right thing to do when you're with a group of people and someone offers up a prayer? I used to be paralyzed by that uncertainty, not knowing what people expected me to do. I finally realized that I didn't necessarily need to play-act like I was joining in, but at least I should look respectful and not distract from what they were doing. Sort of like watching surgery. I can't help, don't know anything about it, but I won't do anything to interfere.
I stood back in the corner by the kitchen door and sort of just tried to look unobtrusive.
I was pretty unnerved because at one point the prayer mentioned a woman in particular and everyone but me seemed to react a little. Someone next to me mentioned that someone who used to visit the shelter from time to time was shot a week and a half ago by her ex-husband. He's in jail, she's in the hospital, they're not sure she's going to live.
If this sort of thing happened where I grew up, you never saw it. Here, people see it. They live it. I felt a lot less secure in the world.
And so they had Thanksgiving dinner. I shuttled iced tea around the room, picked up plates, and generally kept busy. Everything looked pretty good. By about 3:30 people started filtering out to other parts of the shelter or back to the street. Not a lot of ceremony. I was kind of glad I hadn't gotten dressed up to do this (the woman I'd talked to, who I never actually saw there, warned me about this) because eventually I had powdered sugar, turkey gravy, and who knows what else on me. I looked like some sort of menu.
Cleanup went pretty easily. They had a pretty small sink in which to do some pretty big pots and things, but the line kept moving and everything got done after a while. I was surprised by all the people helping at every stage of the day. Most Thanksgivings, it fell to a couple of the women relatives in our family to do most of the work while at least one uncle fell asleep in the living room in front of the football game, snoring. None of that here!
I didn't eat there. There were some leftovers, but since someone had mentioned that the leftovers here were being sent around to a church-run homeless shelter later, I didn't feel right cutting into anything that might help out someone else later, someone who really needed it. I still wanted to just sort of have dinner by myself, anonymously, somewhere. So I had a cookie, helped tear down the folding tables and line them up against the wall for the rental place to pick up, and I was off into the world again.
Later, I went back to where I was staying, changed into clothes without food on them (I'd brought one semi-decent dress just in case) and went out looking for dinner. It didn't take long to find. There was a "family restaurant" sort of place near the next exit on the expressway, and it looked anonymous enough. They had some sort of Thanksgiving dinner buffet, so I went there. I sat there munching on sort-of-dry stuffing and watching some of the people who came and went. I wasn't sure that there was a pattern. There were a few people by themselves... I was one, and there were some middle-aged men who were probably truckers. There were a few old people. Actually, more than a few. Pairs of white-haired old ladies, and occasionally an older couple. I wasn't sure what to make of that. Were they here because they didn't feel like having all the children and grandchildren over? Maybe they didn't have any children and didn't see the sense in making a big dinner for themselves. Maybe they were traveling and had been delayed. I didn't ask. I just sat there, watching and making up lives for them.
It was busier than I'd thought, actually. People came and went, the waitress kept stopping by to make sure I had iced tea and water. Cars went by out on the expressway.
This was the feeling I was looking for. I'd done my good deed for the day, and now rewarded myself in some small way. My reward was watching the swirl of the world around me while not having to participate in any of it, unless I wanted to. I looked out the front window, out at gray Ohio in the early evening, and realized that nobody in the whole world knew where I was and nobody particularly cared.
It's a strange feeling, but one I recommend everybody feel at least once. Everyone who thinks the world centers on them. Sit in a restaurant in Akron, Ohio on Thanksgiving, by yourself. Leave your cellular phone in the car. Just sit there and the world will tell you how important you are. Your importance is inversely proportional to the level of iced tea in your glass. That's about it.
I wasn't supposed to, but I wrapped up a pretty sizable slice of turkey in a napkin and stuck it in my purse to take back to Fargo. When I'd gotten back to the room, he was a little kitten-circle in the middle of the bed and didn't even get up to greet me. Just sort of looked over and yawned. I figured that was worth some turkey.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do tomorrow. I'll probably check out and go find a mall somewhere. Just leave everything in the car and wander around the malls seeing what other people do on the day after Thanksgiving. Tonight there are some old movies on, so there's always something for me to watch. Fargo devoured the turkey in about ten seconds, growling and looking around all the time like I was going to take it back.