Growing up, whenever it was a holiday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, my dad often would look around the room as the meal was being prepared and decide we did not have enough mouths to feed.
He and my mom would get in the car and go pick up a homeless person or two. I don’t know how, but they always knew where to find them.
My siblings and I will never forget the Easter my parents brought home a man named Gordon.
He was dressed in white sheets, wearing sandals and a beard. He was the first vegan I’d ever met. I understood someone not wanting to eat meat, but not to eat eggs? No milk? This was a foreign concept to me.
Our family’s traditional Easter meal was ham and potato salad. Though Gordon had been invited and even transported to our house to join us, he made peanut butter and banana sandwiches on rolls.
And he was more than welcome to it.
I was raised with the belief that: If I have it and can spare it, and you need it; it’s yours.
Our family has always fed the homeless. We set up assembly lines making sandwiches to take to Mission Beach in Southern California to hand out. Leftovers became meals out of the back of our Dodge Caravan for whoever needed them.
If mom was baking bread or pies, she made twice what we could eat so she could pass them out to the neighbors or freeze them, just in case someone needed them.
A few years ago, mom and dad loaded up their truck on Christmas day and drove up and down the freeway in Arizona finding and helping stranded drivers on the side of the road. One of the emergency items they provided? Homemade Christmas cookies.
I was talking with my parents last week about Gordon. They said they took him back to Balboa Park in San Diego after dinner that evening. I still wonder about him.
