The definition of 'longing'

A small fraction of the volunteers who work inside and outside, packaging food, placing it in bags and boxes, and loading it into cars, every Tuesday morning at the Abundance Food Pantry at Forest Hill Church.

The first time I can remember hearing the word “longing” was when I was 5 years old, and my father was telling me and my older brother a story. I didn’t know what “longing” meant, but I figured it out by its context.

The story was that when my father was 8 years old, in 1929, shortly after the Great Depression had started, and he was walking down Coventry Road from his house on Washington Boulevard, behind the then-new library, he saw the waffle man on the corner of Coventry and Hampshire roads. The guy used to come around with his cart and make fresh, hot Belgian waffles.

My father’s family still had some money (which they eventually mostly lost). My father bought a waffle. He said he could hardly wait to take his first bite. But just as the waffle got near his mouth, he saw an obviously poor kid staring at the waffle, “just longing for it.” My father said he couldn’t take that first bite. He handed the poor kid the waffle. And he felt good about it. I have, obviously, always remembered that story, and I’ve tried to live that way, too. 

Another lesson I learned, much later in life, was from the legendary folk musician and activist Pete Seeger. I heard him speak at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and Museum about 25 years ago. After he was interviewed, he took questions from the audience. Someone asked: “With so many problems in the world, what can we do? Where do we start?”

Pete said, “You start right in your own community, and do whatever you can do to help whatever organizations can use your skills. And it will spread out from there.”

I took that to heart and started volunteering. And I still do that. And so does my wife. We each have our pet projects. But we attended a Christmas party in December and talked to a few people there who all volunteer at the Abundance Food Pantry at Forest Hill Church, the Presbyterian church at the point where Lee and Monticello boulevards come together. 

That was on a Saturday, and our friends told us that the pantry is open on Tuesday mornings. So, the next Tuesday morning we were there. And we’ve been there most Tuesdays since then (except for when we were out of town, and ill). We are but two of about 45 volunteers each week, packaging up the variety of foods for each family the pantry serves.

I’m going to write about the Abundance Food Pantry in an upcoming issue, but I’ll give you a few basic facts: It has been operating, and growing, since 2012. In 2024 it distributed approximately 65 pounds of groceries a week to between 250 and 350 families (a family can get food every other week). So that was 13,000 household visits for a total of nearly 850,000 pounds for the year. They cover seven zip codes, including 44118.

The food pantry is open on Tuesdays from 10:30 a.m. to about 1 p.m., and it’s a drive-through operation—people pull their cars up to the back door, in the parking lot, and volunteers load in boxes and bags of food and the people drive out. When we arrive at 8:30 in the morning, there is already a long line of cars waiting.

The pantry’s stated mission is “to help satisfy the food needs of the surrounding community by distributing groceries, by providing fresh vegetables and healthy foods, by encouraging involvement by our pantry customers, by being efficient with our funds, and by being respectful of the space and equipment that is made available by the church.”

Abundance Food Pantry gets most of the food it distributes from the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, but also lots of stuff from several area stores, including Dave’s Market & Eatery on Lee Road, On the Rise Artisan Bread on Fairmount Boulevard, and Bruegger’s Bagels on Cedar Road.

When we first started volunteering, in December, the pantry was getting about eight tons of food from the Food Bank each week. Since January, when the Trump administration took over, that dropped and is continuing to go down.

My wife and I were in Europe a few weeks ago—ironically in Prague, a former Communist dictatorship where, for 50 years, food was scarce—when I read online, on Cleveland.com, that the Trump Administration had cancelled 20 semi-trucks of food that were supposed to come here from the Federal Emergency Food Assistance Program, each truck holding 100,000 pounds of food. And at the same time, Gov.Mike DeWine’s budget proposal calls for a $7.5 million decrease in food-bank funding in Ohio.

As I said, I’ll be writing more about this operation, and I hope, at some point, there will be better news about the future of it, and places like it, over the next four years. I'm longing for better news.