Open Door with Lee

January 23, 2024

Ok, my best part of the day today was definitely the conversation I had with a retired guy named Lee at Open Door. He’s the one greeter who is working a tiny bit on his Spanish and can say a few basic things to clients. He’s also going to Colombia tomorrow, just for a vacation I think, maybe for 5 weeks.

The interesting thing about Lee is that he’s also interested in photography. I had given him a card the other day, and he told me today that he’d looked at my site and thinks the pictures are impressive. It’s funny because today, when he said something about doing some photos, I started to pull out a photo business card, and realized he’d gotten one the other week already. I did tell him it was too bad we haven’t been talking very much, even though we have worked at least half a dozen times on the same night. 

Ok, lemme back the hell up. When I first got to Open Door, 15 minutes early, I was able to talk to the CEO, Jason, right away. I told him that working at the food shelves has literally sort of taught me what I’d like to do with my life, which is assist Spanish speakers in some capacity. I told him I’d briefly gotten a past job that was Spanish-adjacent but was really about teaching English-speaking kids how to speak Spanish, which is not at all what I’m interested in doing. 

Anyways, tonight at Open Door, Italia was there and so was a new girl named Mari who was literally just hired, who also speaks Spanish. Mari was actually born in Colombia and is currently a sophomore at Apple Valley High School. One tiny conversation I had with her was about earrings. I told her I liked hers and she said they were a gift from her mom and were from Colombia as well. I told her I’d just gotten mine from my aunt a few days ago, like usual I mentioning that going to a school with uniforms had given me a massive earring collection. 

I also told both Mari and Italia about a guy this morning at Methodist who was wearing a sweater that said “conceited,” and a lady asked him if he knew what that word meant. He did not, so I guess we taught him one new English word today. I guess now I’m back to Methodist... Today at Methodist we had 197 families come in, and they said in December we had days with 300. Today was still occupied, but not so stuffed.

I also told both Barb and a lady named Beth whom I’d never met before that I was planning on moving in with my dad for a while. Now that I think of it, I definitely also mentioned that to Italia today as well.