For a do-gooder, Reba goes hard on do-gooders. And they don’t exactly trust her. She is a hard-working artist. Most in her social justice group are wealthy women who don’t have jobs.
“I can’t join the food drive,” she told me the other day. “I have to make a delivery to Des Moines. The van is already rented.”
Reba, a potter, just finished a dream job. She received a commission to make an entire service of plates, bowls, saucers, and cups, sixty pieces total, glazed in cream. The theme is fish, delicately embossed. She stood in her studio before a long, heavy work table. After wrapping each piece she packed it, with more crumpled paper, in boxes.
“Want me to help?” I asked.
“Absolutely not.”
She held her breath as I picked up a plate. Tiny carp swam around the edge, in and out of seaweed. “This,” I said. “Should be in a museum.”
“You’re too kind.” Reba took the plate from me.
Reba belongs to the Burkeside Neighborhood Action Committee. She doesn’t live there. Burkeside is a staggeringly wealthy community of 100 plus year-old homes roughly following Minnehaha Creek. The houses are three or four times the size of any home I’ve ever been in. City bankers and politicians, whose names grace our streets and parks, built them as show pieces. In back horse and carriage houses, now garages, are homes in themselves, with apartments for the help. Keeping up any old home requires dedicated helpers, gardeners and housekeepers. I should know, I too own a 110 year-old home, a little one. I’m the help.
“What sort of food drive?” I asked Reba. She told me. Once or twice a year the Action Committee meets at a small warehouse, nonprofit. In a sort of assembly line they mix and package dry bean soup.
“Bean soup?”
“Just add water. It has all the nutrients children need.” Reba folded the top of a box. “I guess.”
“Children?”
“They give the soup to city kids at the end of the school day. So they have something to eat.”
“They need this?”
“I guess.”
I was confused. “What do their parents think of it?”
“I’m not sure anyone ever asked them.”
I saw a problem right away. Actually twenty-three problems. You can make gallons of bean soup for a few dollars. No one in Minneapolis is that poor. And what kid wants bean soup for dinner? I don’t care if it has “all the nutrients”, like dog food. My guess is half the packages never make it home. The ones that do get tossed by exhausted parents who cook their own dinners, and know how to do it.
And children shouldn’t be bringing food home, anyway. Or clothes, or money, or anything but their homework. Food is the parent’s job. I said this to Reba.
“Sylvia says the parents are probably on drugs.”
“Sylvia says what…?” Ignorance is always infuriating. “How dare she? And who do these people think they are anyway, handing out dehydrated food to the kids of working families? Think of what it says. ‘You’re poor. Take this.’ How humiliating.”
“I agree.”
“You do?”
“That’s why I scheduled this delivery. So I could skip it. There’s lots they do I don’t agree with. But lots I do.”
As plates moved through Reba’s hands, I noticed each was slightly different, not exactly round. They were exquisite.
“You make deliveries yourself?”
“The customer is paying me. I’ll hit a couple craft shops on the way home. One thing good about the rich,” Reba smiled. “They have money.”
Yes they do. And here’s hoping they learn to spend it, and their time, wisely.
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com