Food and Felicity wicket

It was like when you were a kid and the neighbour was showing off the new bike his dad had given him for his birthday. Amidst the cheek-splitting grins and ill-contained eagerness, I kept expecting someone to blurt out the rhetorical, “And here it is! Isn’t it something?”

As Gary Crandall let the door to the Knowlton Food Bank’s new headquarters swing open, I couldn’t help but wonder if someone would ever invent an instrument that could measure glee by the size of the smile on someone’s face.

Of course I knew that there would be no need for a happy-o-metre here. There would only be room enough for watching Gary, his wife Bev, and a handful of volunteers radiate in the lair the Brome Lake Food Bank had been given in Knowlton’s new Community Centre.

Knowlton's Food Bank with well stocked shelves

Within a kilometre of the town’s closest empty pantries is this tangible manifestation of sharing, a quantifiable testimonial to anonymous giving and caring that truly is an arena for rich personal fulfilment. It is where felicity is doled out.

Even though he shuns the kudos, Crandall is the organisation’s leader on whom providers rely every week to staff, stock, manage and operate the charitable service. On monthly disbursement days, Crandall takes the pulse of an invisible but ever present component of the town’s demographics.

His is the kindly face those in need get to enjoy while collecting the essentials they require to round off a difficult month, to supplement when there have been unexpected expenses, or to help provide when work becomes scarce.

And on this face were the etchings of a level of inner satisfaction that transcends pride, gratification, and honour; in Crandall’s smile was felicity with all the trimmings.

A Knowlton-born retired teacher and principal, Crandall sees giving people a hand with the basic necessities as on a continuum with teaching. “We just feel it’s important to help out in the community. This is another way to do that.”

Yet for everyone on both sides of the food bank’s door, the involvement goes further than a community service; it takes on a personal dimension, as Crandall has realised after eight years of face-to-face service. “You become aware of the problems people face and on occasion you may even be able to steer them in the right direction.”

The reflective president is in it for the same reasons the others are: the feeling you get when helping someone out. Admittedly it must feel good to be able to ensure that a school-age child gets decent lunches, that a single-parent family won’t have to do without some basics to access others, that everyone will have enough food to make it to the end of the month.

True to form, Crandall applies the food bank’s internal policy with steady, firm, and understanding resolve. The intent is to provide a supplement for the end of the month, not a source of food on a regular basis.

This may explain in part why there have been so few, if any, negative incidents which otherwise could have adversely affected the organisation’s second raison d’être: to provide a forum for the kind of humanity felicity is rooted in.

If felicity, that deep feeling of inner happiness, is to occur, prosper even, it must be unfettered, free of mundane constraints; the food bank provides the givers and sometimes even the receivers just that; a venue to get to the point readily.

No local, provincial, or federal paperwork, no reporting to anyone, nothing to draw one’s attention, time, and effort away from what is important and essential. Here hand meets mouth without intermediary.

Aside from warehousing physical sustenance, the food bank’s new premises also provide Gary with an opportunity to answer the need for social contact that is often expressed by the people he meets.

“Sometimes people like to talk a little about their situation, what happened to them, why they are in the situation they are in. That social aspect is important to me.” More opportunities for contentedness, more sources of felicity.

People may differ in means and ways, but they remain constant in their disposition to needing varying degrees of help and in their interest in opportunities to help.

For Crandall and the lot at the Brome Lake Food Bank, the commitment may be collective, but the satisfaction is very personal. And that satisfaction, that deep sense of purpose, is where felicity lives.

Philip A. Godin