333/365 Christmas Deliveries

A Delivery of Christmas Past:

Saturday before Christmas, parishioners gather in the parish hall, say a prayer, and then go forth in their trucks and minivans and hybrids out into the community. Mike and I, with our girls, have done this every year (Thanksgiving, too, although that isn't quite so involved). Sometimes we show up at doorsteps of immigrant parishioners who aren't even sure what this whole thing means. Sometimes it's grandmothers on fixed incomes who want to give my girls candy for coming by. Young families with big screen TVs that dare us to say something. One older woman who wanted to sell us her treadmill. It's always an adventure, and over the years, has made me, at least, realize that poverty in my neighborhood is veiled in many ways. People who can get by except that it's hard at the end of the year, or people who spend money in ways I might not, money they don't have. People who send their money home in envelopes with red borders.

Last year, we had an address a little further south--in a rougher area of the parish (our parish just consolidated a few years back and gained territory I don't know as well). It was an old side-entrance flounder house (which put it probably as the oldest house on the block--they are peculiar to St. Louis and Alexandria, VA, old and odd, like half a house), and before I even stepped onto the porch, I could smell it. It was something I hadn't pulled up since I worked in the housing projects the first year I taught. A sweet smell, but rotten somehow, stale. Poverty. Scent and sound make an impression on my brain like nothing else can, and I am suddenly taken back to Jarvis sitting next to my desk with this angry look on his face while I hunt around the room trying to find what smells so bad...and then I realize it's him, and I just make it through my day without another word.

The woman answered the door, and behind her I could see the filthy kitchen. Mike asked if she wanted him to bring the things back. No, she told us. Just hand them to her. Her five kids, all pale tow-heads, too thin, half dressed, like images out of a Bosnian war film, were slumped on the bunk beds in the too-hot room in front of the kitchen. The woman was about my age, and the look on her face said it all, right? Maybe. Mike, who is better at this sort of thing, asked if she needed anything else, and she shook her head, staring at us as we stepped off her porch.

There wasn't much to say on the way home.