Meals on Wheels

A funny thing happened on my way home tonight.

It was "pizza night" for the canvass team- for those unfamiliar with canvassing or pizza night, it will suffice to say that we are rewarded with a free piece of pizza (net value: $2.50) for knocking on people's doors and begging for money all day (net value: -1 soul).

We were all sitting around the table attempting to hold a normal conversation (interactions between canvassers are usually limited to "rap practice", where you go back and forth repeating the same 10 lines until your cheeks go numb. "Hi, My name is David and I'm with Environment Massachusetts..."). More often than not, "normal conversation" is just a discussion of the day's canvassing, but with a few curse words and indie music references thrown in. These interactions are painfully awkward and are generally akin to drinking a glass of OJ immediately after brushing your teeth- it still tastes like toothpaste.

For some reason tonight, there was an uncharacteristic miscalculation that left one extra piece of pizza. Rather than force down the extra slice, we decided to "make a contribution" to whichever homeless person we saw first.

About 3 blocks up the road, we spotted a gentleman sleeping under the awning of a store. Since the police would probably wake him up in a matter of hours, we decided not to disturb him, but rather to leave the pizza box with the leftover slice at his side. As we walked towards the train station, we looked back to check and see if our footsteps had woken him up.

Just as we turned around, a woman on a wheelchair flew by and stopped at the sleeping man's side. She grabbed the pizza box and rolled away before any of us even knew what to say.

It is difficult to judge who needed the pizza more, but it was a series of events that developed rapidly and still have me scratching my head. In retrospect, I don't know whether I should have chased her down (maybe thrown a stick in one of her spokes) and gotten the pizza back, or if I should be glad that atleast someone was enjoying our excess.

Atleast we have something normal to talk about for next pizza night.

-Dave