Hi Folks,

Concord University in Athens, W. VA.

On March 12th I received an email from a college student in West Virginia.

“My name is Emily and I attend a college in a small town called Athens in southern West Virginia. I am in a political science class this semester and we are trying to implement a One Can A Week program in the town.”

That day I sent Emily a bunch of information and then forgot about it. Friday I got another email from Emily.

“We have implemented the program and have collected food for the past 3 weeks. We have about 90 regular participants and we have collected almost 500 pounds of food in all.

“We are presenting our program to our local Lion’s club in a week so that they can continue the project once we have graduated in May, and we were wondering if you guys had any videos that we could present to them.”

The Lion’s Club holds its biweekly meetings in the Concord United Methodist Church in Athens. On Monday, April 16th, Emily and her classmates will present their One Can A Week program to the club and hopefully the members will pick up the gauntlet.

We don’t have a video at this time, but we (meaning Molly and her crew) are working very diligently on one so I brought her into the email loop. Molly responded to Emily in a heartbeat.

Hi Emily,

Thanks for your interest in One Can A Week. It has become an issue near and dear to my heart as well.

I’m afraid that is not very much time for me to put a rough cut together. I am still shooting the interviews and have not even gone through my existing footage. I will try to get you a short clip of Peter’s interview and the director of the Food Bank. At least that way you can have something to show, but it will not be a complete overview and it will be very rudimentary.

I hope the meeting will be a success for you. Good luck. I’ll be in touch.

Molly

Email is so great especially when dealing with pros. Molly got right back to Emily and will have something ready for the April 16th meeting. But what impressed me most was Molly’s comment that One Can A Week is “near and dear to her heart.” It is one thing to have a documentarian to tell your story but quite another to have such a pro on your side. We’re quite lucky and I have to say, I’m quite grateful.

 

New, Rosemary designed Community Food Bank collection box at the Sunflower Farmers Market on Speedway and Swan.

 

Rosemary Chacon, the Events/Marketing coordinator at the Speedway Sunflower Farmers Market wasn’t kidding those many months ago when she said she loves helping the Community Food Bank and will bring back the collection box as soon as possible. On Tuesday, I got her anticipated email.

“Hi Peter,
It seems like it has been a long time since we’ve touched base, I know that I have been extra busy as I’m sure you have been also.

I have a full box of food items in the box up front for you when you get a chance to come this way.

Have a good day and I’ll see you soon,

Rosemary “

In keeping with Rosemary’s strategy, the box is small and attractive. Also it is in a very high traffic area where customers see it coming and going.

The first pickup the next day netted 76 lbs. and Saturday’s pickup amounted to 6 lbs. That’s 86 lbs in one week.

Welcome back, Rosemary, we really did miss you.

 

San Pedro Chapel and neighborhood association meeting place.

 

Recently retired Frank Flasch has been building a One Can A Week program in his neighborhood. It’s especially challenging since there are three Home Owner Associations to organize.

Frank’s email last week describes the task before him coordinating several gated communities at once.

“For the month of March, 3 HOA’s have contributed to the One can a week = Four Cans per month program, over 110 lbs of foods

Those 3 HOA include the Fort Lowell Estates, La Sonrisa and Orchard River.

“As you know the food bank is in constant need of food. So please if at all possible contribute to this program. I would be glad to meet with each of the HOA groups to explain the details of the program and help each of (the) HOA’s create a champion to carry the program on in your area.”

The best advice I can offer Frank is never go away. Neighbors like that kind of behavior when it comes to helping them learn to get and stay involved in community service.

 

 

It’s a sure thing, all of the neighbors in the Miles Neighborhood will receive a glossy

11″ x 17″ plate poster. What is not so sure is the timing of delivery to your front door. It’s
a budgetary thing.

Outstanding Food
The parking area leading to the Community Food Bank warehouse docks was just resurfaced and now the food really stands out in the shopping cart. No more grey cracks and bumps in the background.

We collected a total of 198 lbs. of food. The money we donated amounted to $55.81, a $50.00 check and $5.81 in cash.

See you Sunday,

Peter

Hi Folks,

Focus Hath Charm…

“…we just live together.”

 

“Call me back on your other phone, John suggested, “this will take awhile.”

Whenever possible, early Saturday afternoon is naptime. So I was almost perky when my client and friend called at 4 pm with a computer question. And getting to use my $1.66 a month MagicJack computer phone instead of that minute-by-minute money-gobbling cell phone lifted my spirits even more.

John is always fun to work for and with but today I could hear a special sense of commitment in his voice. He wasn’t giving up so easily in our game of trying to help an inexperienced pilot land a Piper Cub over the phone. He executed every move I suggested with no mini mutterings and no mistakes. In five or six tries and a couple of reboots, we figured out how to open the new program on his new Mac Book Air.

Blackberry and PC is where John started when he began his business. Over time he switched to the iPhone then iPad and recently Mac Air. It is his well thought out strategic plan to “synchronize” all of his business tools, but more important, he is taking ownership of his idea to heart.

That’s probably what I felt. John is into his technology now and not frustrated with machine idiosyncrasies as in the past. He is tech focused and it is his will to be so.

I was a bit euphoric when I hung up because I remembered my own focus epiphany and how great it felt to understand something so critical in life. Of course, my journey was more like a dune buggy ride on the Baja 1000 Off Trail road race, than a smooth Piper Cub landing.

The last few weeks of my Army tour in Germany I began to experience some awful feelings even once coming close to passing out in a restaurant. I shook it off and concentrated on my pending release stateside. Back at my job in St. Louis those feelings returned with a vengeance and I learned they were anxiety and panic attacks. I was depressed which I also learned runs in my family. Not heart attacks, although my mother died of one, or cancer or common diseases like that. We get depressed and live longer than most, suffering all the way.

Since college I wasn’t terribly successful working in the corporate world which probably was the cause of my lower than dirt self esteem. Those suicidal thoughts hurt and scared me half to death.

Then one morning about 6 months into my depression, I had the first of my two life altering epiphanies. I was behind the wheel of my green Beetle on my way to work when I realized “I could not think of anything else.” I said that out loud I remember. Your mind is racing and thinking of a gazillion things but they are all on one subject, your feeling of worthlessness.

My next thought was to do something fun but difficult to get my mind working again. I was a musician playing bass in local jazz bands so I decided to teach myself guitar. That night I bought a $30 Alvarez guitar and a simple classical guitar songbook.

Right after dinner at 6 pm I sat down to play and didn’t move from that chair until midnight. I did that every night for two straight weeks.

The first 12 hours were spent learning to play two bars of quarter notes correctly. The struggle in my brain to coordinate tempo, picking and fingering was herculean. Eight notes and I couldn’t get it right.

At the end of two weeks I realized I had been undepressed for one week. I went right by the depression and did not even notice. Than, too, I could play any number of Etudes in that songbook. Welcome back self-esteem.

That was my second epiphany. Focus was my issue and now focus was my friend along side that wonderful guitar. It’s the first thing I pack when I move and it has never left my sight since that first night. I don’t play the guitar any more, we just live together.

In Tucson, before 9/11, I used my experience in defeating depression to help a few TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) patients. One in particular, Sally (not her real name) was having a terrible time finding a job. In school she was quite a basketball player so I suggested for her mental/physical project she dribble a basketball everywhere she walked, which was most places since she did not have a driver’s license. Focus is the only thing you can do dribbling a basketball or you are chasing after it a lot.

She thought the task was so much fun and again within a few weeks, her smile inflated. The first job she interviewed for ended with a call back even before she made it home. That message on her machine was the best news she had had in years.

People often ask me when I might give up One Can A Week. Perhaps now after reading this update they will understand that focusing on consistently feeding the hungry is an integral part of my being. So never.

Biggest Box of Cereal Ever

If you are wondering how many kids 10 lbs. of cereal can feed, wonder no more. The answer is 110. That huge box of Quaker Oats in the upper left hand corner of the cart says it can fill 110 plus hungry tummies. Sounds reasonable since tummies, like cereal boxes, come in different sizes, too.We collected a total of 178 lbs. of food. The money we donated amounted to $34.50, a $25.00 check and $9.50 in cash.

See you Sunday,

Peter 

Hi Folks

When I pick up Maria’s Catalina Vista donations on Sundays, her dad, Carl, an Optical Scientist at the U of A, is there to greet me sometimes. This was one of those Sundays.

Our conversations are always easy, interesting and thoughtful because Carl looks to understand human behavior. We talked about the nature or nurture of generosity in people and if they are born to be a liberal or a conservative. I was on both sides of this issue telling Carl about a study that discovered poor people are more generous than rich people. However, when the researchers told the rich people to imagine they were poor and the poor people to imagine they were rich, the poor became less generous if they thought they were rich and the rich became more generous if they thought they were poor. Nurture at work.

On the nature side, we talked about our earliest memories where we just felt the desire to help people. If we saw something out of place, we deemed it important to do something to correct the situation.

This thought suddenly stirred a memory from my Army days. After basic training, I was stationed in the Headquarters Company at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma writing news releases. Our stone barracks were near the administration building and quite nice compared to what I lived in during basic training. The floors were polished cement and the bunk beds were double-decker frames placed in a casual order about a large room.

One day as I returned from a not-so-hard day at the PIO (Public Information) Office, I noticed an 11B20 soldier (basic infantryman) lounging on a top bunk reading a book. That was unusual because Playboy Magazine was the standard fare. I asked him what he was reading and he said a physic book. I soon learned he was RA (Regular Army volunteer) and held a Ph.D. in physics. I, on the other hand, was a US (draftee dragged in kicking and screaming) and graduated Summa Cum Last.

I knew the infantrymen were attached to our Headquarters Company and their duty was to put out fires on the artillery range during the day while they awaited orders to ship out to Nam.

Without saying much more than “What the hell are you doing as an 11B20?”, I wrote down his service number and the next day I visited the personnel office.

He may have been a soldier but he was more a physicist with his quiet, somewhat shy demeanor. I knew I had to do something because he was not equipped to get himself out of his life-threatening dilemma.

Since I was in the Army barely 90 days, I understood very little about military procedures but I did know that the Army had a mistake to correct. The first officer I encountered in personnel was a Captain. “Sir,” I said with not too much confidence,” this is the service number of an 11B20 attached to Headquarters Company. He has a Ph.D. in physics. I think he is in the wrong place.” I handed the Captain the piece of paper on which I wrote the soldier’s service number and left.

The next day around noon I started up the barracks steps and the soldier in his dress uniform, dragging his duffel bag, came through the door.

“Hey, where are you going,” I said a bit surprised.

“Cape Canaveral. I’m being transferred. Going to work with rockets.”

That’s all we said.

(During that period of time, Cape Canaveral, from 1963 to 1972, was called Cape Kennedy but many of us never made the changeover.)

It’s been forty-six years since then, and now and again I think of that soldier and I’m sure he is telling the story about a guy who saved his bacon just because that guy saw something out of line in the universe. Bet the personnel Captain is too.

Carl said he really liked my story. That’s probably because he is a member of the U of A Physics Department and a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy.

There is a new show on TV called Touch with Kiefer Southerland. It is about a man whose Autistic son sees the order of the entire universe and has his dad help fix peoples lives when things go awry. Fascinating show, but we don’t require someone with special powers to tell us when something is wrong. All we need is a strong sense of what is fair and the will to think of others more than we think of ourselves.

 

 

Things are ever changing around us, but we as a neighborhood have kept to our One Can A Week commitment for 13 straight quarters. Based on averages, for the past three years we donated 229 lbs. of food and $50.18 in cash per week.

In our first quarter of our fourth year, we donated 206 lbs. of food and $57.08 in cash per week.

That’s got to be the finest example of community service consistency on the planet. Somebody call Guinness.

Twinkie Attack
Terri opened the door and handed me her donation. A bright blue and white box featuring a big yellow Twinkie was on top. (Pictured in the front of the cart.)

“Oh, no, those will never make it,” I thought. “Wait a minute; did I say that out loud?”

Terri smiled and said emphatically, “No.”

We both laughed.

The very next stop was at Greg’s house on the corner of 12th Street and Cherry. He walked up to my car and studied the donations spilling out of the container in the back seat.

“Twinkies! Give me that.”

We talked and we laughed some more before I drove off with the Twinkies secure in the back seat.

We collected a total of 164 lbs. of food. The money we donated amounted to $33.15, a $25.00 check and $8.15 in cash.

See you Sunday,

Peter