It is November. Are you kidding? Is it just me, or did summer seem only three weeks long?
Halloween has come and gone, which means Thanksgiving has to be about three weeks away, which likely means tomorrow. Goodness.
And we should rightly keep tearing pages off this year’s calendar. This has been one sad, hellish, nightmare of a year. Not one of us should be sad to see it go.
The beginning of November and the start of the holiday season means a couple of things: that my inbox will be filled with pleas to help the most unfortunate among us. Truthfully, that is never a bad thing.
It also marks the time of my annual or, depending on the year, the biannual pilgrimage to Sister Carmen Community Center not far from my home in Lafayette.
It is one of my favorite places in the world, mostly because I cannot fathom what this life would be without it.
It runs a food bank serving much of east Boulder County, and a thrift store that I sometimes swear does as much business on any given weekday as Wal-Mart down the street.
It was the other morning, and the place was filled with people, each of them struggling to pass each other in the narrow aisles.
Yet everyone, best as I could tell, was happy, more than glad to have any of it.
It is enough to make you rethink and reorganize your own life, which is the whole point of the pilgrimage.
I greet Suzanne Crawford, the chief executive, warmly. How are things going, I ask.
Volunteers a week ago gathered at the center, she said, and boxed more than 1,400 holiday boxes for Thanksgiving and Christmas, or about 300 more than were handed out last year.
She will need every one of them, she said. She has learned, she adds, to expect the worst.
“Truth is,” Suzanne Crawford said, “we have been really busy this year.”
Last year, the center required that newcomers and repeats for food boxes would first have to sit with a case manager, who would attempt to recognize their needs.
Now, it just skips the case manager stop.
“People just kept coming back a second and third time each month,” Suzanne Crawford said. “They would tell us the food was great, but they needed more to make it to the next month. We were overrun.”
She decided case workers’ time was better spent focusing on truly helping people, rather than monitoring the food going out. It is a better system, she said.
The number of people coming for food and other help has increased more than 15 percent a month from a year ago. There is no longer any shame associated with asking for food, Suzanne Crawford said.
“Shame and refusing assistance is no longer an option when you have to eat,” she said.
Most days she is amazed that it all still works. It is a testament, she says, to the caring nature of many members of the community.
“They are suffering as much as anyone else, but they come through,” Suzanne Crawford says. Some big donors have scaled back their giving, in many cases, by as much as 30 percent.
“This is not a business of certainty at all,” she says. “Hope is the only thing we really have for certain.”
It made me remember, yet again, why I come here at this time every year. If I buy one turkey, I’ll buy two.
It is, I figure, the perfect metaphor for a very difficult, troubling year. A lot of us today may have a lot less than we used to have.
We should never forget that others are a boxful of food away from having nothing.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
