Wednesday - November 05, 2008

a blade of grass, growing

I went up to the grocery store to pick up some breakfast and to buy the Morning After newspapers. I can’t tell you the last time I bought an actual newspaper, and I could write for hours about the naive idiocy I’ve read in the stories therein. But that’s another post.

I was coming up the aisle and saw an old man trying to get some soup cans off the bottom shelf. He had to squat down with his shaky knees while holding onto the shopping cart handle. Various lady shoppers were detouring around him, wearing various looks of annoyance and impatience.

“Hey, do you need a hand with those?” I asked him.
“I sure could.”

So I knelt down on the floor and got the cans for him. Dozens. Every last can of Beef Noodle soup in the store. He sure must love this kind of soup! No, it wasn’t for him. He was buying it for the soup kitchen over in Phillipsburg. ( a small city in NW NJ that has a lot of low- and no- income families ). He goes shopping for them in the off-hours when the stores aren’t too crowded. I let him know that I’d grown up working in grocery stores, and that any store will always get him a clerk to help him if he asks at the desk. He thanked me for my help and we both went on our way.

I got my OJ and was on my way to the check out when I passed him in the frozen food aisle. He was buying the bargain brand Banquet frozen dinners by the dozen. I jokingly said that he didn’t have any trouble reaching those. We chatted again, and that’s when I noticed his shirt had the Order of the Arrow monogram. I was in Scouts when I was a kid. Cub Scouts, Webelos, Arrow of Light, Boy Scouts, Merit Badges, the whole bit. Nearly 30 years later and that arrowhead still impresses the hell out of me. In my day it was a very rare sign of the best of the best. We talked some more. “Scouts doesn’t teach morals anymore”, he said, “I don’t know what the world is coming to. It’s just one more activity, like soccer camp. Parents just drop off their kids and leave. They don’t even attend the Eagle ceremony, and that’s the biggest event in a young man’s life. And now the country is turning Socialist. That’s not what I served three tours in Vietnam for. I didn’t have to go back the last two times, but I felt my country needed me. And when we all came home, what happened then was disgusting.” Turns out he is also the Scout’s Shooting Sports Program Director for this whole big chunk of the state. Teaching boys how to shoot guns. In New Jersey. Talk about an uphill battle.

So I talked a bit more with this kindred spirit, asking him about the food bank. Were the Scouts involved? Were they funding this? No to both. The whole thing was out of his pocket. “I’ve been part of the food bank in Phillipsburg for 10 years. We used to help out 78 families, now there’s 459.” I said that we always had a can or two for the food drive barrels, and that I’d always gone out of my way to put old clothes, cleaned, in the Goodwill boxes, until I learned what a con that is. [Those clothes get shredded, the pulp gets sold to China, and some of the earnings get distributed. Meanwhile the management gets paid enormous salaries. None of the clothes actually go to your neighbors in need.]

So I got his card, wished him luck, and gave him $20 to help his efforts. And you’re damn right I thanked him for his military service and let him know that it was the right thing to do.

We don’t need big government programs to help each other out. What we need are more people like this guy, John Kauza, to make an effort close to home. Willing to get involved, willing to actually do something. One more blade of grass, growing, sending down roots.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/05/2008 at 11:53 AM   
Filed Under: • Heroes •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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