Friday, December 19, 2008

Meals on Wheels

Today I (finally) volunteered with Project Open Hand. They create meals for people with regular or special dietary needs, who are elderly or too sick to cook for themselves. They also deliver the meals to them. Today my route was to deliver to ten people, through Buckhead down Peachtree. Most of them put coolers outside of their doors for you to put the food into, or they yell at you through the door. Several were inside an assisted living home. When I got out on the 5th floor of them home, it wreaked of cigarette smoke, like I walked right back into the seventies. No actual human contact on this floor. The next floor smelled like... PATCHOULI! Very strange, but I actually got to talk with three people on this floor. A sweet elderly blind man, with a special diabetic meal, who told me about the collapse of the Botanical gardens in Piedmont Park as soon as I opened the door. He talked to me the longest, and then told me to tell one of his favorite ladies that he was going to beat her for not taking his route in a while. Other than that, I got a "Merry Christmas" and, "I'm on my way to get some stitches outta my arm!". Anyway, it was kind of like a scavenger hunt, looking for hidden coolers and making sure I delivered the RIGHT meals. And it did my heart good. I'm going again in the morning.