Today has been an odd day.

It’s been kind of like everything that happened today has been on “mute”. Life spins and swirls around me, but everyone and everything I know feels far away, and I can see mouths moving, but I can’t hear anything. It’s the feeling of being a bubble boy. You are alive, but you feel an arm’s length between you and everything going on in life. It happens off and on. I guess I am sort of used to it.

I got up fairly early this morning to try and get some writing and studying done, but that did not happen.

I and my nephew Brett and his girlfriend were supposed to meet at the Roadrunner Food Bank to volunteer at 11 this morning, but at about 8:30, I realized I needed directions to the warehouse, and I had conflicting addresses, and I needed to make sure Brett had correct directions as well. The two phone numbers on the Food Bank’s website were unreachable. Google queries about the warehouses’ address added to my confusion. A Facebook request for clarification from others I know who might have volunteered there went unanswered. And like that, the morning writing time was spent trying to determine where we were supposed to be going. At 10:30, with no replies to Facebook messages and emails sent to the Food Bank, my sister helped me to think more clearly and I shared directions with Brett, and we went to where we thought the warehouse was supposed to be.

And it was.

At Roadrunner, Brett and I joined about fifteen other volunteers for a two and a half hour session of sorting produce. That was the task for the day. Ada couldn’t make it.

The project was pretty straightforward. On a few palettes in one area where we worked were boxes of produce of various kinds. Some of the produce was bagged and dated, like salads, and spinach, and broccoli. Some of the produce was loose. All of the produce needed to be unbagged and put into either a) a banana box of good, edible food which would then be shipped out and distributed to people in need wherever it went, or b) a bin of outdated produce, which was then emptied into a tipper dumpster. The produce in the tipper dumpster would go on out to South Valley to feed animals on a farm.

The basic rules for sorting produce were pretty simple as well. Bananas, berries, and opened melons went straight to the animal feed bin. If it was packaged and dated, would the food be good in four days? Four days is the amount of time it takes to get the sorted food out from Roadrunner to its destinations. If your bagged lettuce was looking brown or liquidy at all, it goes to feed. The last rule was to put citrus in boxes separate from the other fruits and vegetables.

And so we sorted. In the pile of donated food boxes was a little of everything. Lots of bagged salads. A few boxes of potatoes here. A few boxes of cherry tomatoes there. Boxes of berries that were emptied straight into the tipper. And a whole lot of plastic boxes of donated salad lettuce and spinach. There were boxes of arugula, cauliflower, broccoli, mushrooms, and peppers. There were bell peppers and zucchini and bags of apples and mini oranges and limes and lemons. And there were a few bags of rotting onions.

Brett and I got a little distraction mid-session by helping the leader lady roll a bunch of cardboard boxes to two compactors at the back of the warehouse.

It was a good experience. It wasn’t crazy hard work. And Roadrunner feeds so many struggling people in this poor state. It was a good volunteer experience, and a good memory made with Brett.

Tonight, I still smell like onions though.

After volunteering, I came home, and collapsed. Tired and mentally stale, my afternoon disappeared before the end of a basketball game on TV, a nap, and several Longmire episodes.

My mind, like my writing, feels stilted and sluggish. I’ll try to get a little more reading and writing tonight in anyhow before an early bed time.

What I do know is that it is a good thing to serve, and I need to do it more.