A rookie's attempt at "Meals on Wheels"

You haven't lived until you have slipped and slid up and down 20 steps to deliver food to the elderly...part of the "Meals on Wheels" program. You should have seen my jaw drop when I found out I hadn't brought enough food the first time so I would have to navigate up and down the icy steps another time.

A friend of ours had surgery this week and he asked for some help. For the past dozen years, he and his wife have represented our church in delivering meals on wheels to a dozen or so elderly in Mandan.

He told us that it would take about 45 minutes. Pick up the food at the Golden Age Club at 11 a.m. and deliver it to the addresses. No problem right? Wrong.

First of all, the food wasn't ready when we first arrived. So we had to come back 20 minutes later. Then we received two larges Thermos containers. In one of them appeared to be sack lunches. I didn't look in the other. Big mistake.

So, like hound dogs looking for a bone, my wife Belinda and I set off in our car to find the first address...in a part of town we've never been. Having located it, I brought out a sack lunch and handed it to a young lady...maybe a caretaker I thought, at the address. Then I was back in the car looking for the second house a half dozen blocks away. The same scenario played out only this time an old, stooped man was waiting and looking out the door for my arrival.

"Wow, I'm getting the hang of this," I thought.

The third house was behind the abandoned Jr. High building...on the side of a steep hill. There were two sets of steps with a landing in between. It didn't take me long to figure out why the steps weren't cleaned off. The people getting these meals are often home-bound. But the steps were covered with rutted ice and very treacherous. With sack in hand, I held on to the rail and made it up the steps to the house. Inside was an elderly, frail man sitting in a chair with the TV turned up full blast. He had just hung up his phone as I entered the house.

"That was a gal calling for you," he said. "You need to bring us a hot meal along with the cold sandwich...and you need to go back to the other two houses and give them their hot meal as well."

What? I didn't hear anything about two meals...but after sliding down his stairs and checking the other Thermos, I saw that he was correct. There were as many hot meals as there were sacks. So back up the steps I went. I apologized for my error. He mumbled something, and I went back down the steps, this time holding on to the rail with both hands.

I broke the news to my wife that I had blundered and that we would need to re-track. No problem. This time we had an easier time finding the homes that we searched for the first time. To add a little suspense to the goings on, my cellphone rang so my wife got to take the hot dishes to the surprised recipients and express our apologies with her warm, sincere smile. I'm not all that good at that.

Then it was off to a pair of houses where it said the recipients were diabetic. Now, if you know anything about diabetics, they like to eat on time. And if they're blood sugar falls, they can get a little snippy. Well, that must have been what happened. Belinda took one set of meals (hot and cold) and I took the other. I was greeted at the door by a daughter who told me her mom was not so happy with the service this day because we were late and she was hungry.

By this time, I had finished polishing up my apology. So out it came...with some added flourishes. And I was off.

The next house was interesting because I had to go to the door in the alley. Inside the house was a woman who was obviously deaf because she didn't hear my knock, she didn't hear me enter nor did she hear me holler at her. When she turned around, there I was. "Surprise."

Anyway, it was all I could do not to laugh because she walked over to me with the same tiny footsteps that I had see Tim Conway take on so many episodes of the Carol Burnett show. I should've known they were based on real life, but until today, I hadn't not figured that out.

The next two recipients were at the Lewis & Clark Hotel in downtown Mandan. Once upon a time, the hotel was probably pretty classy as it's located across Main Street from the former Northern Pacific Railroad Depot. However, that day of classiness has long passed. I've been in the hotel before and it smells to high heaven.

Not wanting to get sick, I asked Belinda if she would deliver the last two meals. She agreed. So I stayed in the car with Grandpa and answered another cellphone call. After a while Belinda returned. We were done.

I asked her if the place still smelled. She assured me that it did. I told her I thought it smelled like an old sweaty gym sock. She said it smelled like years of stale cigarette smoke. We agreed that it smelled bad.

As we were driving back to the Golden Age Center to return the containers, Belinda said, "Well, that wasn't so bad." That caught me off guard.

But then I thought, "I'm sure if we do it again, it will be a lot better."

But if I learned anything from it, perhaps, it was this: "Grandpa really leads the life of Riley because he lives with us. His meals are always hot and he isn't wondering if some rookie 50-year-old will be delivering his meal 15 minutes late or giving him only a cold sack lunch when there is a hot meal that's been bought and paid for."

By the way, the hot meal looked exactly like a TV dinner.

Communication miracles

When I was a little boy, we had a party line telephone that we shared with one of our neighbors. My Grandma Van Dyke, who lived on the edge of town, had a party line phone she shared with what seemed to be hundreds of neighbors. If all her neighbors decided to rubberneck on the conversation, she would have to tell them to get off or the call would get so weak that you couldn't hear her speak.

Obviously, we've come a long way in 50 years. Now most people I know carry a phone on their hip and they aren't sharing the signal with even one other person. Cell phone conversations can be so crisp that you think the person you're talking to is in the next room and not three or four states away.

Mostly, that's because today's telephone signals are digital rather than analog. Do you remember when we had dial phones? The dial would send an analog signal to a central exchange and connect you to the right party. You could actually hear the click, click, click of the equipment moving in the telephone exchange office. Now we hear a beep, beep or perhaps nothing at all.

But that's just one of the marvels of modern communication. This holiday season, I enjoyed meeting Derek's girlfriend's family -- who live in Brazil -- through the little camera on her computer and the little camera on our computer.

The cost of the call? Well, really there wasn't a cost, at least not anything additional from the monthly Internet fee we already pay. And yet we could talk to them and look at them.

Again, I remember Dick Tracy from the Sunday comics when I was young. He had a watch where he could talk and look at someone at the same time. Man, I thought that was pure science fiction...never gonna happen. And yet, it has. Maybe we aren't using a watch, but can it be very far off if we can do it on our computers and computers can be wireless?

I'm also enjoying the heck out of Facebook. It used to be that a family had to have a reunion somewhere and it involved a lot of people driving many miles if they wanted to visit with each other. Now, through Facebook, I'm in regular contact with a lot of my family -- cousins, second cousins, children of cousins, etc. -- simply by logging on to my trusty Facebook account.

Since I'm a communicator by trade, there's no real shortage of things for me to comment on -- Grandpa, my family, politics, religion, visitors, current events, you name it. If asked my opinion, I'm NOT smart enough to be tactful and keep it to myself. So I'm sure my extended family has figured out that I'm liberal Democrat who can't wait to have the government spend everyone else's money. My motto is: "the only fair tax is the one that I don't have to pay." So if the party in power sticks it to the rich or to the bankers, I know that it won't effect me one iota -- because I don't shop at stores that are owned by rich people, buy energy from utilities owned by rich people or have a bank account that could possibly have increased fees to pay for increased taxes. In a sentence, I'm gullible enough to believe that what politicans tell me is good for me, really is good for me. They are much smarter with my money than I am.

See, there I go again, espousing my opinions. So here's to digital communciations. Don't you feel like you've just been lectured again by grumpy Uncle Steve, but it's clearer now because of modern technology.

Following in the steps of typewriters and carbon paper...

Over my Christmas vacation, I read a story about the things that are on their way to extinction. No this has nothing to do with climate change and the polar bears, black-footed ferrets or whooping cranes...this extinction is caused by the advances made in technology.

A couple things on the list seemed a little hard to believe. I suppose that's because I'm 50 and I've grown up with them, but young people don't seem to be as enamored by them as were their parents.

The first is the land-line telephone. The writer of the article believes that land-line telephones will be extinct in 10 years.

Now I remember turning 20, graduating from college and landing my first job as a reporter. Along with my first job, came my first apartment and my first phone. At that time, the phone company was a monopoly (Gasp!) and so my new phone was from the Bell telephone company. I rented my phone from them because they didn't sell them in discount stores. That was part of the monopoly deal. However, I couldn't wait to have my own phone because it meant that I would get my name printed in the telephone directory. That was a sign of adulthood...in fact, it was one of the last signs of being an adult since the drinking, voting and every other thing in the world occurred when you were 18 in those days.

Now young people don't seem to want to have their name in the phone book, so they opt for the cell phone. Even some old people don't seem to care because they have given up their land-line phones too.

However, I have adopted the "over my cold body" defense. First, if I don't have my name and number in the telephone book, I won't be bothered by survey companies and telemarketers...and you know how much I like to be called by these two bastions of society. (Actually, the word bastion was originally going to be another another word that sounds like bastion and starts with the same four letters, but I digress).

Now besides land-line telephones, the second thing on the list toward extinction is face-to-face conversation. The author of the article believes that texting (on cell phones) will replace simple, every day conversation.

Now I'm sure that what he writes he believes, because I have seen young people sitting around in the same room texting to each other rather than just talking. But seeing it doesn't make it right.

This past week, I was visited by numerous nieces and nephews along with my in-laws and my brother. You could see that the older people (including myself) enjoyed the friendly banter while the young people looked down at their crotches and continued to text each other.

My brother and I don't know how to text and I don't think we're going to learn. I'm pretty sure the same goes for my dad and my in-laws. So if face-to-face conversations end by the end of the decade, it's not going to be a very fun place for the chatterers among us.

My second grade teacher, Mrs. Cebull, identified me early on as a chatterbox. And let it be known that she was right. I'm the one who will start a conversation in a crowded elevator with a perfect stranger.

But I will not text.

So in the coming years, I will keep my eyes and ears open for land-line telephones and face-to-face conversations to see if they will disappear into history the way carbon paper and typewriters have. Carbon paper has been replaced by copiers and typewriters by personal computers, such as the one I'm typing on today. Here's to a new year and a new decade, but let me keep my phone and my mouth.