On Tuesday, four young men delivered meals to senior citizens living in Globeville. This is the teens’ practice twice a week. It’s part of their routine, and routine is important to them, as it helps define not just the day but their relationship to this particular community.
Globeville long has been one of Denver’s more isolated neighborhoods, born of and surrounded by industry, further cut off by Interstates 70 and 25. The homes are small but well-kept, and in the summer, flowers spill from front yards.
Laradon Hall sits off Lincoln Street and East 51st Avenue in this neighborhood. Laradon houses a school and day programs for developmentally disabled youths and adults. Between the two, it serves 600 people a year. The four youths are among them.
Nathan Roberts, Deion During, Jesse Moralez and Trevaun Bellamy range in age from 14 to 17. With the exception of Jesse, they are unable to communicate verbally. Jesse is the most outgoing, possessing a wonderful smile. Though complicated sentences elude him, he can make himself understood. At any rate, one does not need speech to convey what it is to need or what it is to be needed.
The meals Laradon students and adults deliver go to elders enrolled in the Volunteers of America Meals on Wheels program. The typical recipient is a widow in her 80s who wants to live at home. What’s been established in this neighborhood exists nowhere else in the city. It’s a relationship that began 25 years ago, when the elderly served today might have just retired, before the canes and the oxygen tanks and the house-bound days.
Back then, it was common to segregate the developmentally disabled.
“It was an isolated population that was patronized,” says Annie Green, deputy director of Laradon. “It was, ‘Well, they really can’t do anything,’ or, ‘Isn’t that cute?’ “
What was created, then, is the partnership of two communities, each of which, in its own way, has known isolation. “And 25 years later, we’re still going strong,” says Jim White, VOA’s director of community affairs. That early partnership has expanded now to 12 delivery routes in the city.
We’re at the VOA offices and kitchen, where the youths are gathering the meals. This is part of their lesson: picking up the trays and boxes, loading them in the van, closing the van door, looking both ways when crossing the street, saying — with words or not — hello, thank you, you’re welcome.
White and Green have worked together those 25 years, and White laughs as he remembers how one recipient, fond of the young man who delivered her food, asked him if he wanted her dog after she died. “No,” he replied. “I’d rather have your TV.”
There was, too, the older gentleman, so lonely he burst into tears with the first visit, and the young Laradon student who delivered a meal and then helped herself to the woman’s potty. The woman’s son greeted the news with equanimity. “When you gotta go, you gotta go.” On the eve of that girl’s graduation, the woman gave her the only gift she could afford: baseball cards fished from cereal boxes, collected in a stack and wrapped in tissue paper.
The day I ride along, the recipients turn shy. Some do not like to admit need. Some are not feeling well and are accustomed to their own routines. Milton Luke, 83, a widower still mourning his wife of 50 years, accepts the meal with a series of profuse thank yous and God bless yous.
“It means so much to me,” he later tells me. “They’re awful good people.”
It is a simple front-door transaction. Yet, in the meeting of eyes and smile of greeting, in the passing of food from younger hands to older, there lies a vital mutual acknowledgment: You are not alone.
Only Jesse can articulate the pleasure of this service in a way most would comprehend. As we sit in Annie’s car between deliveries, he fidgets in the back seat, face alight with huge smile. Leaning forward, he calls out, “Go!”
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
