Like Shortshot80, I also live on the Oregon coast, in perhaps the town most reliant on tourism. I've owned this place since I bought it "halfsies" with my parents in 1962. They retired here full time when Dad was 72 (I bought another place nearby), and sans planning, I moved here full time just before my 72nd birthday, although, like my self-employed father, am still not retired at 77. When we first moved here, I had a contract to work one day a week for a client in the Portland metro area, which is two hours away. Since I was driving every week, I volunteered to pick up "a few" loaves of donated bread for Backpack for Kids here...and, although my contract with the client ran out two years ago, I still drive every week, often coupling a doc visit or client meeting to the hour or so loading what has turned into 400-600 loaves of bread every week!

During ordinary times, every winter lots of the low-wage restaurant and motel workers here are unemployed, waiting for Spring Break. Our town has only 8,000 residents, but houses an additional 40,000 or more visitors most weekends. The town is 100% reliant on tourism. We've had as many as 500 kids on Backpack some winters, which is a lot for such a small town. The average family income of schoolkids here is so low that ALL qualify for free breakfasts and lunches. The school district has pitched in to package and deliver two meals every day via regular bus routes. We've been supplementing that with food boxes for the families with kids on Backpack (the most needy). I also pick up bread for a church program, which is now operating out of a member's home, a retirement home where residents have no kitchens, a place that provides emergency food and clothing and ID help, and the town pantry. Right now, we don't need nearly as much as we ordinarily need for Backpack, so 200 loaves of what I picked up Thursday afternoon is headed for Food Share 40 miles away first thing tomorrow morning, to serve people who live south of us.

The really nice thing about living here (in addition to the lovely surroundings and all the animals we enjoy watching cross our acreage) is that the people are really, really generous. All the charities have received $$ and food donations--there is a large group of well-off retired people living in very nice places, and they've been very helpful, not only now but over time. Every time one of the charities has a fundraiser, the first people to show up are those who volunteer for other charities! A coffee company with a tiny cafe owned by a couple (no employees) faced being shut down by coming up with a proposal that people buy a pound of coffee from them so that they could donate the coffee and half the profits to local first responders. As a result, that couple and their two young kids are doing okay, in spite of the fact that self-employed people without employees fall through the cracks. It makes me sooooo happy to deliver bread to all the places I help and learn that others are contributing as well.

The woman who's running the church pantry now that the church is shut certainly has no money to spare. She's an unemployed night clerk for a big motel these days, but she set up a small pantry outside her crummy trailer home to serve the community that lives in a collection of trailers and 5th wheels so dilapidated that they can't ever be moved. While she was still working full time, she volunteered for the church's pantry program seven days a week. Now, she cooks meals for the 70 people in the retirement place three days every week. When we gave her a pkg. of frozen meat that we couldn't pack into food boxes because it was frozen and told her to eat it herself, she sliced it into thin strips and made stir-fry for the people in the home. Now, that's a truly good person! Yeah, and she has two large rescue dogs--no surprise.

Even though I'm not doing two big jobs that would mean nice money to upgrade something here, if we do receive stimulus money that we don't need because our retirement is large enough to allow us to save a little, we'll buy things for the various charities with it, patronize the coffee people and others who are working hard to figure out ways to keep their heads above water. Look around you: there may be lots of people working behind the scenes to help others. There are lots of good people out there!