On a Helpless Day

On Monday morning, I took the Lady of LaBelle to get her weekly food box at the pantry downtown.

The Lady of LaBelle, you might recall, is the grandmother and matriarch of an army of children and grandchildren who live with her in a rental on the corner, the ones I call the Baker Street Irregulars. She calls half the people on the block her nieces and nephews because it’s easier than explaining who’s a blood relative and who’s adopted family. I took her to the food pantry, and I took one such niece who’s even poorer than the Lady, and I took myself. I haven’t needed the pantry very much this year, but I still legally qualify because Ohio’s limit for food pantries is much higher than its limit for EBT benefits. We were having a tight week ahead of the holiday. X/Twitter’s algorithm had collapsed right after the election, and part of my paycheck comes from being seen by my readers on social media. I got a box of cans to stretch out our grocery budget. We’ll bounce back up and have another good month soon enough. Soon I’ll never need the pantry again.

When we were packing up Sacre Bleu, the Lady of LaBelle surprised me and said I could have her box as well.

That’s legal because these are donated cans from local grocery stores, not government commodities that have to be eaten by the exact person they’re given to. I once did the same to help the Lost Girl. The Lady of LaBelle explained that she had enough food for the next few days and then her food stamps would renew right after Thanksgiving.  She heard that we’ve had trouble making ends meet.   This month, she was richer than me. The food was mine.

“There’s steak in it and everything!” beamed the Lady of LaBelle.

She is always like that.

I took the box home, and fried up the package of minute steaks.

On Monday night, the mother of the Baker Street Irregulars, the Lady of LaBelle’s daughter, brought me the smallest turkey I’ve ever seen. She’d been shopping again for all her Thanksgiving supplies. There was a huge sale on the remaining turkeys, a great reduction in price per pound, which meant the eleven-pound bird was five dollars, and she just couldn’t help herself. If I had another Thanksgiving turkey already, I could keep this one in the freezer for Christmas. I thanked her a thousand times.

On Tuesday, the Mother texted me that the Man Called Dad was bringing us a sweet potato pie as well, so we’d be all set for a great holiday no matter what, and I thanked them again.

The Baker Street Irregulars are always like that. They are the most generous people I know.

Today, Wednesday, I took the Mother to her doctor’s appointment. When she got out, she was anxiously texting on her phone, because there had been a catastrophe.

I am fictionalizing identifying details of the people involved, to protect the privacy of the children. But this situation is real.

The niece I had met on Monday lives in a house with another family, and the family is on drugs. She has to live there because she’s very poor and they split the cost of rent. She desperately wants to get out, because that family sometimes hit her, but she can’t find a cheap rental. She is a caregiver for her own children as well as that other family’s children. Last night, the other family’s toddler came down with an infection and was life-flighted to a hospital an hour from here, and Niece went with the baby because she was sitting for them. She’s been stuck there unable to get a change of clothes for 24 hours. Today, she found out that the toddler tested positive for drugs. They must have accidentally eaten something the parents left out while crawling around the house. The hospital called social services, who swept the house and confiscated ALL the children: not only the other family’s children, but Niece’s as well. And it’s the day before Thanksgiving.

I didn’t know what to do except reassure the Baker Street Irregulars’ mother so she could reassure Niece over the phone. I promised to be with them if they wanted a grown-up sounding voice to talk to the social workers on Monday. I said this probably meant the social workers would help Niece get her own place more quickly. I observed that maybe her horrible housemates would end up going to jail over this which would serve them right. But I don’t think Niece calmed down at all.

I went home to clean my kitchen and get ready for the holiday, feeling helpless.

I looked around my food pantry box, and the things I had in the cupboard, to see if I could at least make the Baker Street Irregulars some sweet corn muffins or something, to thank them for the help and to say I was sorry that Niece’s family was in a mess. It’s all I could do. The only thing I know how to do in a situation like this is cook.

There are people on this earth with hundreds of billions of dollars. They have more money than they could possibly spend, no matter how hard they tried. If they set fire to dollar bills, they could keep warm until they died of natural causes and never go broke. They use that money to manipulate social media to influence elections because they can, and build rocket ships for fun. Meanwhile, this network of marvelous people I know here in LaBelle are trapped in the direst poverty, and the law picks on THEM. And there’s nothing I can do.

All I want is for good people to be happy, but I can’t make them happy. I don’t have anything to share, except the occasional ride to run errands. I’m not a lawyer or a social worker. I don’t have any money. I need help from friends far more often than I like to think about.

I thought again of that daydream I’ve had a million times: of winning the lottery or the Publisher’s Clearinghouse, paying off my student debt, and buying LaBelle. I would make a deal with every landlord. I would buy the derelict houses from the city as well. I would tear down the houses that couldn’t be salvaged. I would fix up the houses that people lived in, make them nice, fit them out with solar panels to save money and be better for the earth. And then I’d sell them back to their tenants on some kind of no-interest rent-to-own scheme. Meanwhile, I’d fill the vacant lots with orchards and community gardens and micro-prairies, tiny urban apiaries, houses for the songbirds and the bats. I’d build safe playgrounds for neighborhood children. I would hire a private guard to chase off the drug dealers and pay to send the addicts to a nice safe quality rehab. I would make this place into an Eden so that everyone could be happy.

But I can’t do any of that.

There’s any number of hopeful ways I could end this post. It’s nearly Advent. I should be saying something about the Blessed Virgin and Saint Joseph setting off on that stupid donkey with nothing, for the census, and what that tells us about how God loves the poor. But I am so bewildered, I don’t know how to go into my hopeful voice.

That’s not a very good way to start the holiday season, but here I am.

Pray for the poor, and after you pray, help make it a more just world.