Since last spring, I’ve been making weekly food deliveries to the PHA Webster Ave campus.  For a while last year, the routine was for me to drive into the back parking lot and leave the cases on the back stoop and call/text Maureen the school nurse who would arrange to pick them up and haul them up to her second floor office.  Relatively easy-peasy. This year, Maureen spent the first weeks running between the 3 PHA campuses, so the routine needed to change.  I’ve been pulling up as close to the front door of the school as possible, parking illegally with my flashers on while I dodge Webster Ave traffic with heavy crates of fruit.  Then one at a time, I haul them in.

1. Down the few steps outside.
2. Buzz the outer door.
3. Wait for the click that tells me the door is unlocked.
4. Enter and up the few steps to the main floor. Wait and hope that someone, maybe the same person who buzzed me in notices me and unlocks the second set of doors.
5. Then through the second locked door straight ahead down the hall where I stack the boxes outside the nurses office.
6. Back down the hall, the steps and out the front door.

Repeat steps 1-6 for as many crates as I have.  I get my workout.  Earlier in the year, when most PHA staff were oblivious to my efforts, I would sometimes go unnoticed at the door.

But things are changing and doors are opening for me.  My last two deliveries were welcomed by staff responding quickly to my buzzes, opening the second locked door for me, offering to help, expressing appreciation.  Life is good.

Now I just need to recruit a couple of additional delivery volunteers as backup…