It put me in a cold apartment on the north side for three years. Peeling paint in the hall by the meter. A radiator that works when it feels like it and has been looked at four times.
And a space heater that I run beside the kitchen table from about the first week of November until March, which costs more than the radiator would and which I know perfectly well.
Twice a week I walk six blocks to a church pantry.
Tuesdays and Fridays. It takes about eleven minutes each way and I go early, before it fills up.
Soup. Bread. Powdered milk. Tinned fruit, which I do not much like and take anyway. Enough to see me through to the next one.
It is a good pantry.
The people who run it are kind and completely unsentimental about it, which is the correct way to run one and which about four other places I have been to have not managed.
