From the outside it looks like a particularly huge warehouse, but it hasn’t the strangely menacing, fortresslike look of the great windowless citadels of consumerism, Walmart and the rest. When you get inside, you see the cathedral. The high, airy entrance hall leads you first, on an elegantly stone-tiled floor with little bronze decorations set in here and there, to an area of offices and cubicles. Most churches hide their administrative department, but this one puts it right out front. The walls are blond wood, everything is spacious and handsome. Like the high nave of Nôtre-Dame, the startlingly high steel-braced wooden ceiling soars above all the small human activity down on the floor beneath. In the old cathedral that height creates a great, mysterious, upper space of shadows. But the space beneath this vault is luminous.
It wasn’t till I entered the interior, the cathedral proper, that I understood why they’d built the ceiling so high. As there should be, there are great doors to open into the sacred space. And as a sacred space will do, the first sight took my breath away. I stood silent. I remembered what the word awe means.
Much of the interior of the huge building is visible from that doorway, or would be except that the whole floor is covered with immense, towering blocks and piles and stacks of crates, cartons, boxes, and containers, arranged in gigantically severe order, with wide aisles between each tower or bay. Only down the aisles can you see the far walls in the far distance. There are no permanent walls or divisions. The immense, splendidly cantilevered ceiling stretches serenely above it all. The air is cool, fresh, and clean, with the faintest smell of garden stuff, fresh vegetables. Vehicles run quietly up and down the aisles, miniforklifts and the like, looking quite tiny among the high blocks and stacks, constantly busy at moving crates and boxes, bringing in and taking out.
Well, it isn’t a cathedral. That was a metaphor. It’s just a warehouse, after all.
But what kind of warehouse stores nothing to sell? Nothing, not one item in all these (literally) acres of goods, is or ever will be for sale.
Actually, it’s a bank. But not the kind of bank where money is the only thing that happens.
Here is where money doesn’t happen.
This is the Oregon Food Bank. Every box in the great cubical stacks between the aisles, every carton, every can, every bottle, every crate, holds food. Every carton, every can, every pound, every ounce of that food will be given to the people of Oregon who haven’t the money to buy what they need to live on.
It is a cathedral, after all. The cathedral of hunger.
Or should I say the cathedral of generosity? Of compassion, or community, or caritas? It comes to the same thing.
There are people who need help.
There are people who deny it, saying that God helps those who help themselves and the poor and the unemployed are merely shiftless slackers sponging on a nanny government.
There are people who don’t deny poverty, but they don’t want to know about it because it’s all so terrible and what can you do?
And then there are people who help.
This place is the most impressive proof of their existence I ever saw. Their existence, their efficiency, their influence. This place embodies human kindness.
In, of course, the most unspiritual, lowly, humdrum, even gross way. In a thousand cans of green beans, in towers of macaroni boxes, in crates of fresh-picked vegetables, in cold side-chapel refrigerators of meat and cheese… In hundreds of cartons with improbable names of obscure beers on them, donated by the brewers because beer cartons are particularly sturdy and useful for packing food… In the men and women, employees and trained volunteers, operating the machinery, manning the desks, sorting and packaging the fresh produce, teaching survival skills in the Food Bank classrooms, kitchens, and gardens, driving the trucks that bring food in and the trucks that take food out to where it’s needed.
For these towering walls and blocks and reefs of goods—twelve to eighteen thousand pounds of food in each bay of the warehouse—will vanish, melt away like sandcastles, tonight or in a few days, to be replaced instantly by the supply of boxed, canned, glassed, fresh, and frozen food, which in turn will melt away in a day or a week, going where it’s needed.
And that’s everywhere. The Food Bank distributes in every county of the state of Oregon plus one county of Washington State. They don’t have to look far to find people who need help getting enough to eat.
Anywhere kids are, to start with. Many school-age children in our country, towns, and cities don’t get three meals a day, or even two. Many aren’t always sure if they’ll get anything to eat today at all.
How many? About a third of them. One child in three.
Put it this way: If you or I were a statistic-parent with three statistic-kids in school, one of our three children would be hungry. Malnourished. Hungry in the morning, hungry at night. The kind of hungry that makes a child feel cold all the time. Makes a child stupid. Makes a child sick.
Which one of our children… which child…?
The Tree
January 2011
WE TOOK DOWN the Christmas tree this morning. It was a very pretty little fir, three and a half or four feet tall, a tabletop tree, said the woman at the florist’s next to Trader Joe’s, where we bought it. We put it on a wooden box in the corner window of the living room, as I believe a Christmas tree should be seen from outside and also should be able to see outside. To be exact, I don’t think a tree can see, but it may be aware of light and darkness, of insideness and outsideness. In any case it looks right with the sky over it or through its branches. Before we decorated it, it stood there, sturdy, plain dark green, a complicated higher organism, a very definite presence in the room. When we had an artificial tree, its nonentity made me realize what I feel about a living tree, not only the splendid, big, tall Christmas trees we used to have when I was a child and when my children were children, but a little one too—that it is as much a presence in a room as a person or an animal. An unmoving presence that says nothing, but is there. A very taciturn visitor from Norway, perhaps. Speaking no English, entirely undemanding, wanting nothing but a drink of water every few days. Restful. A pleasure to look at. Holding darkness in it, a forest darkness, in the green arms held out so calmly, steadily, without effort.
Our Norwegian visitor leaned out into the room a little—we couldn’t get it quite vertical with the screw pins in the base—but nobody could see it from the side anyhow, as it stood between the writing desk and the bookcase, so we didn’t worry. It was beautifully symmetrical without having had half its branch-tips sheared off with a hedge trimmer, as lot trees so often have. It certainly was a lot tree. It had never been in the forest I saw in it. It had grown on some slope not far from Mount Hood, probably, along with hundreds or thousands of other young firs in straight rows, one of the dreariest sights in our farmlands, almost as soul-blighting as a clear-cut. It is often a sign of the small farmer giving up crop-growing, crowded out by agribusiness, or the nonfarmer putting in a tree lot as a tax write-off. Our tree had not known forest. It was a forest tree all the same. And it had known rain, sun, ice, storm, all the weathers, all the winds, and no doubt a few birds, in its day. And the stars, in its night.
We put the lights on the tree. We put the old golden bird with the ratty tail on top. The small gold glass snail-shell ornaments we bought for our two-foot tree in Paris in ’54, a dozen of them and a dozen gold glass walnuts—one walnut left, and nine snails, one with a hole in its tissue-fragile shell—go on the top branches, because they are small and weigh nothing and you can see them there. The bigger glass balls, some of which are so old they are crazed and translucent, go lower down; the bigger they are the lower they go, it is a rule of life. The little beasts, tigers and lions and cats and elephants, dangle on loops from the branches; the little birds sit up on them, clutching with unsteady wire claws. Now and then a bird loses its grip and is found upside down under its branch and has to be reseated.