|  As a child,I was an adventurous eater;not especially picky or choosy about food,but every now and again I was presented with an insurmountable food challenge during the family dinner. I remembered recently,not exactly fondly,spending what felt at the time like hours,glued to the dining room chair,having been admonished for not finishing whatever food had somehow survived its trials of being pushed about the plate for the duration of the meal. That the food had utterly failed to magically dematerialize during its torturous path never failed to astound me,and I remember seeking with all of my energy an alternative to actually eating it. And I,like many before me,would inevitably hear those infamous words from one of my parents,“You’ll sit there until it’s gone –there are starving people in world dying for food this good”or something like that. And like all those kids before me,I thought (but never said out loud,of course) ”well,package this up and ship it to them“.
The years have brought me,and even now my own children well beyond these adventures,but I’ve never stopped thinking about the path that food must travel to get to those in real need. We at LostInTheFeed have written about food several times and worked with food banks in South Dakota and Montana,but we had an opportunity this past week to work with the Greater Chicago Food Bank,packing boxes for their Nourish for Knowledge program which sends 6,000 kids home from school on Friday afternoons with food for the weekend. As great as it was to donate some time to help out these families,the most incredible part of our day was learning about the logistics required to get the food shipped from one place to where it’s most needed. Just imagine the trouble I could have managed for my younger self with some snarky comment my younger self might have offered had I known then what I’ve now learned about shipping food to the needy! This one facility takes in more than 60 millions pounds of food each year from restaurants and food companies,and re-distributes it to shelters,soup kitchens and other area food banks all to make sure that the 114,000 people they serve,a third of which are children,have food to eat each day. With an army of incredibly dedicated volunteers,the small staff at this massive facility does incredible work and it was an absolute privilege to help them out for an afternoon. I wonder,every now and then,what it must be like to be famous. I don’t mean the vague sort of famous;double-take glances over the shoulder as you’re passed in the airport,with the ‘are you really the guy’look that follows. I mean stop the room when you enter sort of famous. Hard it must be,I think,not to have some basic level of privacy when out running errands or attending a school function for the kids. The few times I have come across fame,it seemed to me the results of that fame were at least tolerated,and maybe enjoyed even. Do you come to expect the crowd to stop what they’re doing when you enter? Will they still do so forty years after you’ve stopped doing whatever it was that made you famous? My friend John isn’t famous,but he works really hard for someone who is –or maybe was –famous. By the time 1965 rolled around,George Halas had long since settled into this role as owner of the Chicago bears football franchise,having been a player,coach and even handling ticket sales over the years. It was his 38th year at the helm when Mr. Halas,never realizing the fame that was to follow,used his fourth pick to hire an outstanding college athlete known then as the Kansas Comet,Gale Sayers. Mr. Sayers had an outstanding rookie season,winning the NFL Rookie of the Year Award. He frequently broke or tied records over the course of his career,and in 1977 became the youngest player ever inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Real fame,however,found Mr. Sayers in 1971 with the release of the movie Brian’s Song,the story of his friendship with fellow Bear and cancer victim Brian Piccolo –a story so compelling they even re-made it thirty years later! Today,Mr. Sayers is Chairman of the highly successful technology consulting company, Sayers 40,Inc.,a company he founded in 1984. You can imagine my surprise this afternoon,now forty years after Gale Sayers’ draft,to find the Chairman sitting quietly with an assistant at a book-signing table near the commuter trains,the two of them virtually alone in the cavernous hall. He was there to sign books to raise money for his non-profit after school children’s leadership and mentoring program,so the sign next to the table read. As I passed by the table and out into the cold Chicago weather,I remembered that my friend John works for Sayers 40,and I thought about the fact that this successful and famous man was sitting nearly alone in the halls of the train station,donating his time to help out a community of underprivileged kids. I thought he should know people appreciate what he’s doing for these kids. And I thought it would be fun to tell my friend’s Chairman that his staff enjoyed working for his company. So I stopped and turned half way down the block,returning to the still empty table. As I chatted with Mr. Sayers about his book and his foundation,I also made a point to tell him I’d heard great things about his Company from my friend John,who enjoys working there very much.  Every now and then,often where it is least expected,we experience truly incredible service;and when it happens it makes the event memorable –and at a small bistro north of Chicago on Friday night,it happened for us.
We’d planned a casual dinner with friends who we’ve not seen for a while,opting for a popular local place known for its casual comfort food,lively atmosphere and occasional long waits for a table. I wasn’t surprised to see the dining room full,as we passed through to the bar in the back of the colorful room. The restaurant accepts reservations from 5pm until 6:30,nicely accommodating the elderly early bird set and leaving those of us who dine at more reasonable hours to fight amongst ourselves for table space. I was however surprised at the degree of professional orchestration we encountered as we settled in at the corner of the bar. The maître d’hôtel approached us immediately,cruising easily from the corner farthest from our position through the staff packed behind the bar,to assure us that a table would be made available as soon as possible. Unfortunately for him,the restaurant is not large and excess space at the height of service is not among his workplace luxuries. With access to the service window available only through a single path around our corner of the bar,managing to keep waiting diners (like us) clear of the waiters offered us the opportunity to see a master at work. With a practiced mixture of deference and stern,timed instruction,the maître d’ choreographed the dance of guest standing there,waiter balancing trays of steaming food sliding to the right,guest stepping to the left,and both then exchanging places as the waiter slides out into the front of the house and we turn back to the bar. It was remarkable at the moment that we didn’t feel bossed by the maître d’,nor even particularly in the way of the fast moving traffic – we’d been welcomed and included as a part of the orchestration. As the early crowd faded and the pulse of the restaurant slowed,my attention was drawn again to the maître d’,this time as he moved to thank a departing group for sharing their evening with him. I watched as he held first their coats and later the door as they left,and when he followed them out into the evening,I realized I was experiencing an event uncommon in restaurants in the States. I watched him follow couple after couple out into the blustery evening,each with fond wishes and thanks. I hung back behind my group as we moved to the door to leave the restaurant,my expectant glance back rewarding me with the approaching maître d’. As he neared,I turned and walked back to him. He was surprised when I thanked him for his service,saying that I thought he was excellent at his job,a thing both appreciated and not always experienced. To be really great at something isn’t easy,and it was an absolute pleasure to acknowledge the man’s professional excellence. I admit it was a little bit fun too to upend his plan to thank us,and the pleased smile that followed made the evening all the more savory as we all walked together out into the night. My wife Kathy and I were traveling in Bermuda where we had a chance to make a small difference. We had stopped at a small,nice restaurant by Bermudan standards to have lunch. The menu went from casual sandwich fare to entrees more formal. Maybe because the restaurant was only partly full we noticed an older couple whose pride seemed to radiate as they were seated at a table. He was an older gentleman who walked with a cane and the slowness of someone obviously retired long ago. A loving bond was visible as she held his hands on top of the table.
They didn’t seem entirely comfortable with the formality and we reasoned this was a special occasion,but wondered what? So we quietly asked our waiter if he knew whether it was an anniversary perhaps? He said they were father and daughter celebrating his 96th birthday. Their coming to this “fancy” restaurant was something he had always wanted to do. 22 years ago a couple sent Kathy and me a surprise bottle of champagne. Since then we look for opportunities when they arise to do something similar. We told the waiter we wanted to pay for anything they ordered and not let them know until they asked for their check and to please keep us anonymous.
We were told they were surprised and very appreciative. It was just a chance to make a small difference.
Thanks Lost in the Feed. September and October are always the busy season for me,with everyone back from summer holiday bliss and refocused on whatever tasks lie unfinished from the year’s list of goals. It’s the time of one last big push before the holiday season consumes us once again. During this time,we often scale back our lost in the feed projects to smaller,more personal tasks which somehow seem less interesting as writing subjects than they are as LITF projects. There has just been no time for writing about the look of abject despair on the delivery guy’s face as he works through the spacial relations challenge of his huge metal cart and the double glass doors blocking his delivery path. One door he can manage,but the cart is too wide. Even as he tries the second door,watching as the first closes perilously close to the corner of his metal wheeled battering ram of a cart,he knows he’s stuck. I can see him thinking about throwing one glass door wide,yanking open the second and slamming his cart through,forlornly weighing the likelihood of his shattered future if one or the other closes too soon. Stopping to help,to hold open one door,is such a small thing but I know from his look of thanks that dozens of others had passed by him unnoticed. Time too has swallowed the story of the elderly woman fighting desperately to separate her chosen shopping cart from its captor,the grocery cart having preceded it in the queue. Although seemingly locked in mortal combat,she’s committed to this cart’s liberation and oblivious to the desires of the other dozen single shopping carts around her,each eager to assist the woman in her shopping. But no,she has decided and it will be that cart or none I suspect,and so I approach. It took some shaking and jostling to pull them apart,and I appreciated the down-and-under cast glances we were both getting from the others streaming past,but I smiled now understanding that having someone jump into the fray with you once committed to a task,even one maybe less than rational,is just a good thing. It seems,however,in this economy time has not subsumed everyone as it once did during the autumn back-to-work season. My reminder of this came as I was approached recently by a former co-worker via LinkedIn. A hard working professional,I remembered from my prior life,now out of work with ten million others. I wasn’t sure how to help,but knew I could at a minimum give hope and offer to open a few doors. After confirming some facts,wants and preferences,I sent off a dozen emails,and made another dozen calls to friends,to peers and competitors,and to former associates to see if perhaps the stars might align to brighten one’s day. We spoke today on the phone,my former colleague and I,and it wasn’t the relief that two of the calls had become real leads that they were eager to express,but rather simple thanks that someone had gone out of their way to try to help them out. One of the most significant quality of life differences between the Midwest and New England has to be the ability to park one’s car remotely close to one’s destination on a regular basis. And while the exercise opportunity offered to the east coast driver is actually quite beneficial,as they trudge miles from some barely legal near spot seized in final parking desperation seconds before their scheduled appointment,it is the combat involved against the other bordering-on-lunacy drivers that I do not miss. Somehow,the city planners executing the Burnam Plan in 1909 Chicago figured out how to pack in just enough businesses per parking space to ensure that there would always be room for one more car,just when most needed. Or maybe the parking gods were still rolling around in hysterical laughter at the way their antics cause me such regular havoc at O’Hare,and didn’t notice the impending intersection of my car and the empty parking space,just outside of my destination today. As I pulled up to the spot just outside of Chicago’s Second City,I wasn’t sure how long it would take to pick up the running packet and number for my wife’s pre-marathon run. I noticed a number of runners heading into the store,either to pick up their own numbers or to find last minute equipment for the upcoming Chicago marathon,so I punched the 30 minute parking button and dropped a few coins into the machine. I like the new system Chicago uses,allowing you to park wherever you can fit rather than in a predefined parking space,and then printing out a receipt to place on the dash. That done,I headed into the store. As is typical for the Midwest,it took no time at all despite the fair number of runners also seeking their own kits,and I was back at the car just in time to see another runner pulling her car into the now vacant spot behind mine. I hurried forward to open my car,grabbed the parking receipt,and headed back to the emerging runner. Maybe her experience will be like mine,I thought as I drove north,and she’ll have been in the same store for the same six minutes,and find another runner pulling in next to her as she leaves,passing along the receipt once more. As I was careening through the streets of the City on the way to Heathrow today,my stray thoughts seemed to return again and again to the retro fashion I saw sweeping past the car windows. Really,one of the wonderful things about traveling is the constant reminder that there are so many different ways to do things;many ways to speak,to eat,to cross the road,to dress. And this naturally brought my thoughts to the eagerly anticipated upcoming “What Not To Wear In Montana” series expected soon at the excellent twokitties blog. But as I stood finally in the terminal waiting for the overhead display to announce my gate,a steady stream of What-Not-To-Wear-Anywhere candidates passed before me. I briefly considered a set of cell phone pictures to capture the otherwise-well-dressed suited man with the plastic white flip-flops or the dozen or so retro leggings-boots-sweater crowd to help you appreciate your mistake in thinking London style has moved beyond 1982. But also catching my eye was a short young man,maybe 13 or 14 years old with the biggest 70s hairdo I’ve seen in a very long time. He was clearly traveling alone,intensely talking into a cell phone as he paced around the hall. The fact that this massive bob of hair (think Marge Simpson,but round) was pacing back and forth across my path was a bit distracting but totally comical. I watched him for a while,back and forth,and turned my attention back to the overhead board to find my gate announcement. I didn’t realize he was actually in some distress until he suddenly arced toward me and said to me, “My Dad wants to talk to you”. Uh… The series of racing thoughts that came next were quite amazing in retrospect. How did his Dad know I was here? Uh…Wait,who’s your Dad and why does he need me? Uh… Do you really mean for me to put that in my ear to talk on your cell phone? Instead of taking his earpiece,I smiled and asked him if it was he or his father that needed help. After some back and forth he managed to communicate to me that he was trying to find the 11:20 flight to Riyadh but couldn’t figure out where to go. (I loved the way he used at least twice the number of syllables as I to correctly pronounce the name of his home city and I’m still practicing,but may never get that quite right.) Another glance at the board showed his gate 23 departure,and my offer to show him to the gate was met with both surprise and shoulder-falling relief and appreciation. Although I could not get all the way to his gate with him,stopped by immigration access to gates other than for my own flight,I wondered how relieved I’d left his worried Dad and I dreamed that someday his father might meet me as I wondered lost in the maze of the King Khalid airport. I was struck this week by the intersection of two great stories;the first from Kari Lynn Dell (@Kidell),a wonderful writer whose descriptions of rodeo family life often brighten my day,and every now and then knock me clear off my chair with laughter. Like many of her readers I too have been to the Lake McDonald trailhead she describes in her most recent story,and remember finding myself completely befuddled by the total lack of relationship between my own map’s description of where it said I was and my physical surroundings. Wrong map? Map flips over. Nope,right map. Wrong lake? Over-the-shoulder glance back to parking lot,memory of sign with the right lake’s name. Nope,right lake. Growing apprehension. Misread map? Map crumples,flips back over,upside down and back to right,offering the same inexact blather clearly written as a joke by someone who was standing far away from here,or maybe so long ago it didn’t look like this. Yeah,like before the glacier receded I decide. Having confirmed my confidence in my physical location,I studiously re-read the descriptions of the the trail,confidence dimming that the map and this trail have any common thread;a handy thing once one is deep into the wild and interested finally in the return trip. At last however,thoughts of it’s a loop,how wrong can I go? surface as I trek off around the lake. But where would you turn if you really did get lost? On the trail in Glacier Park,tools like a GPS,sat phone or the inevitable tourist from New Jersey thrashing up the trail give comfort help is at hand if every really needed. In life,the tools are not always so obvious. But then you find that there are people like Chester R. Cook, whose daily work generously offer those lost on their own road the same real comfort. Mr. Cook,or better the Rev. Dr. Cook,has been working with a team of people inside the Atlanta Hartsfeld-Jackson airport at the Interfaith Airport Chaplaincy,a sanctuary in one of the busiest airports in the world. As regular LITF readers know,I travel a great deal and can appreciate the stressful and confusing,even debilitating problems that can arise for those without the resources or knowledge to manage the sometimes major bumps in the road. Rather than waiting for folks to find his chapel however,Rev. Cook’s proactive outreach searches the airport for people in distress. Helping out travelers whose tight connection is at the other side of the airport by flagging down a transport cart,or working directly with airline officials to convince them that stranding the great grandmother isn’t a great idea,or providing a compassionate ear for someone just stuck in the airport without a way out all seem just a normal part of his day. Reaching out to those individuals in need in both big and small ways strikes at the heart of our own mission,and we loved hearing this NPR piece about these many stories of both material and spiritual assistance offered by the IAC’s volunteers. They are an incredible testament to the potential of human generosity,and inspire us at Lost in the Feed today to quietly support their efforts. And next time I’m scheduling a trip through ATL,I look forward booking a later connect,so that I can stop in at the chapel to say thanks in person for all the work they do each day. 
Every now and then one is totally surprised by another’s good deed. With the days growing shorter as summer wanes,it becomes especially easy to grow hyper critical of those charged most directly with helping those in need,especially with the daily news filled with various creative misdeeds of local government officials. In 2003,perhaps to make up for some completely heinous offense,the good people of the Illinois government actually did something worthwhile,very much living up to its charter. It developed the Good Samaritan Energy Trust Fund to help lower income families manage their budgets by paying their heating bill for a month or two during the heart of the winter. For our southern readers,it gets cold in Illinois in the winter –really cold. I know this because around January in my house,printed newspaper advertisements for real estate properties in Bend or Santa Rosa mysteriously begin to appear in some great numbers. I think I even find them piled up on the kitchen counter,stuffed in my laptop,wrapped around the remote,and even lining the dog’s bed. Okay,maybe I imagined all that,but I am pretty sure I can never find a really good answer when inevitably asked “why do we live here again?”. In the depths of winter,opening the electric or gas bill generates it’s own kind of heat,but the numbers can be staggering even when expecting a shock. For lower income families,choosing between food and heat is an unfortunate January reality,one that we hope our small LITF efforts today on behalf of the Energy Trust Fund make just a little less likely.  I was thinking this week about a haunting snippet of a conversation that had ended ‘it’s always the little things that matter’. We know there are massive foundations working grandly to fulfill the promise of humanity and loads of both main stream and obscure charities working to solve intractable problems,but in true LostInTheFeed style,we focused our attention this week on making a difference at the individual level,one single person at a time.
As regular LITF readers know,I fly a lot during the summer months and being somewhat a creature of habit I tend to park in the same place,take the same elevators to the same underground hallways to the same terminal gates each week. Of course the parking gods frequently (okay,always) mess with my plans,but somehow on most trips I do manage to pass this one busker,lovingly plying his trade in the depths just where the acoustics bring the sounds of the trains and planes,pedestrians and sweepers together in perfect harmony with his incredible,pitch-perfect voice. I’ve hurried past the man more times that I can count,always wondering the same:from where he came,why that spot,where does he go after,is there some government permitting office allocating hallway space and do we really pay a fleet of inspectors to chase unlicensed musicians out of dark airport hallways? On this particular return flight,already three hours later than planned,I was struck once again by the quality of the man’s voice as I rounded the hall toward the parking garage,and decided,cash in hand,to learn more. I nodded as I stopped to read his sign and thank him for the weeks of walking serenade,and I could see in his eyes the joy his ears delivered to him as his voice joined with the natural volume of his chosen place. I listened for a while,reluctant to interrupt,and decided finally that my questions should remain unanswered and I should just enjoy the reasons he chose to do what he does in that spot. I left smiling,and I still wonder today if the collection of funds he draws,sped just a bit by our efforts,feeds him nearly as much as the music he generates and lives in each day. | |
As a child,I was an adventurous eater;not especially picky or choosy about food,but every now and again I was presented with an insurmountable food challenge during the family dinner. I remembered recently,not exactly fondly,spending what felt at the time like hours,glued to the dining room chair,having been admonished for not finishing whatever food had somehow survived its trials of being pushed about the plate for the duration of the meal. That the food had utterly failed to magically dematerialize during its torturous path never failed to astound me,and I remember seeking with all of my energy an alternative to actually eating it. And I,like many before me,would inevitably hear those infamous words from one of my parents,“You’ll sit there until it’s gone –there are starving people in world dying for food this good”or something like that. And like all those kids before me,I thought (but never said out loud,of course) ”well,package this up and ship it to them“.