Dear Feastlings,
In 2020, at the tail end of March, our friend and former coworker was working at Tucson Medical Center in the first ward to be converted to a COVID ward. It was one of the scarier parts of the pandemic- we didn’t know how the virus was transmitted, who’d be unscathed and who’d end up on a ventilator, if one was even available, and whether they’d come off that ventilator alive. Feast, along with every other restaurant, bar, hair salon, gymnasium, theater and hundreds- thousands, really- of other businesses, was all but shuttered, and we had no idea how we’d pay for this, but we wanted to send food to our friend Michael and his colleagues at TMC.
We’d been unable to serve food indoors, and what takeout food we sold was paltry compared to a normal season, so we put it out there: we asked you, our regular guests, if you’d contribute to feeding people on the front lines of a weird, scary disease whose cause and whose effect we knew nearly nothing about, and to show you our heart was in it, we contributed too. We donated sixty meals for the two hundred forty meals you all donated, and we fed three hundred people that day- the COVID ward, the cardiac unit and the Emergency Department. And, it turned out, there was money left over, so we started all over again. We went to two Banner hospitals and did the same thing.
Since then, we’ve donated meals to every hospital in the greater Tucson area, to clinics and rehab hospitals, to Diamond Children’s Medical Center and the VA Hospital, to Palo Verde and CODAC and COPE and the Banner Crisis Response Center. We’ve donated food with your help to the staff at animal shelters and subsidized housing, to first responders and assisted living for low income seniors, to Casa Alitas and Food For Life, to shelters for people experiencing homelessness and housing for people transitioning out of homelessness.
On May 27th, we’ll go back to two shelters where we’ve been many times before, to feed men at the Primavera Men’s Shelter and women at the Sister Jose Women’s Center, and this time will be special, because the twenty-fourth person we feed one of three hundred meals this time will be the ten thousandth person we’ve fed. We have all of you to thank for it, and so do the people we serve. Whether you’ve donated five dollars or thousands, whether you’ve forwarded an email or mentioned to a friend what we’ve been doing in passing, we’re grateful for your contribution. Feast has long been a proud and happy contributor to various and sundry organizations in Tucson, and, I hope, has long fostered a sense of family within our four little walls, but never before these past two years have I understood the power and grace of community like I have in this project.
We wanted to get to this point much sooner, and we were on track to, when we found ourselves so short-handed that our donation runs perforce became fewer and farther between, but here’s that haiku again that I love so much:
Oh, Snail!
Climb Mount Fuji
But slowly, slowly!
-Kobayashi Issa
Thank you, all of you, for sticking with us to get us to this remarkable milestone. We’ll treasure you all for it, and for the thousand other ways you’re being you.
Gratefully like you can’t even guess,
Doug