Colette

Colette had recently begun volunteering at the Oregon Food Bank. 

“My memories feel so vivid sometimes they seem like they’re happening at the same time as my life.”

“Yeah”

Things were going well for Colette, but she felt something was missing from her life. She wrote in her journal that she was selfish, then scratched it out and wrote that she felt selfish. She's always been sensitive about stuff like that. Probably this film her parents made her watch when she was little in which they wrote words on bottles of water and then studied the water under a microscope. The water molecules that got words like “wonderful” and “love” were beautiful and intricate but when the scientists wrote words like “stupid” and “kill” the molecules looked dead and gnarly like a smoker’s lungs. “It's selfish to live in America,” she wrote, proud of the thought. 

Volunteering helped a little to ease her egotistical self-image, but she also liked it. She liked to help people, because it made her feel like a good person, and she wondered if it was possible for a human being to act selflessly. 

At the big warehouse she stood on an assembly line and packed juice into boxes, before sliding the boxes along to the next station where they would get milk or peanut butter or jars of peaches. The boxes were for the elderly, and the food was purchased by the government for the food bank - these were the first two things she asked, mostly out of curiosity. This was just a stop on the products’ journey. Nothing was made or used here, which is an interesting thing about warehouses. Colette tried to think about the reason this was interesting to her; and gave up quickly. 

She tried to talk to the volunteers who flanked her on either side - a stylish young man packing milk and a much older, kind of sick-looking man crafting the boxes - but neither of them were there for socialization. Colette quickly got bored and began counting the juice on the palette.

Despite the boredom, there was something deeply satisfying about how seamless the process was; someone took the cardboard and folded and taped it into a box-shape, passed it along a line of volunteers until it was full of various shelf-stable food, and at the other end of the room someone would tape it up and slap a label onto it. There was a kind of neurotic guy who reminded Colette of a chiwawa, the way he puttered around almost vibrating. He seemed in charge of everything and would take the pallets - when they were full of completed boxes - into a much larger adjacent room. At this point a forklift would take the pallet away to some magical sleigh that would sprinkle the food over the town. Who knows what happened back there, it was an entirely different ecosystem that Colette would probably never understand or involve herself in.