Delivery
This newsletter has been going out to you five times each year. It has
a number of purposes: We want to tell you what we are doing and why
it is so important
that we do it; We want to ask you to continue to support this work. Almost
every small charitable organization sends out newsletters for these
purposes.
Beyond those purposes I wanted to send to you something that was worth
the time you take to read it, I wanted it to be a little gift from
all the people
that
you have cared for that you don't even know. There is sadness in the lives
of the people we want to be for - so in this newsletter that truth needed
to be
told. But there is much joy also, and you have to hear something of that
in these pages. In the midst of difficult circumstances - even misery -
beauty breaks
in; so in these pages, a drawing, a poem, some reminder that we are beauty
blessed every day.
Last week there was a new pull-out sofa bed delivered to Domenic House:
beige plaid with greens and blues in it, herculon fabric, scotchguarded,
set down
in the sitting room of the studio apartment there. Sometimes the road
is so long
and winding, we forget the original promise or lose faith that we will
ever be able keep it. Its more than fifteen years since a group of people
from
Paoli
met a group of women from the streets of Philadelphia and the Bethesda
'project' began with no more promise than 'we act towards one another
as if we belonged
to one family.'
It project doesn't end with this sofa, but you must know that that hesitant
promise comes to some fruition with the delivery of this new sofa bed.
The sofa would
go here, and the table there and the TV over here, she told me. And
she told me that her six and seven year old grandkids would be able
to stay
over,
on the pulled out sofa, and breakfast would be made and they would
watch cartoons together
some Saturday mornings. and I knew that its occupant would, for the
very first time be able to have her six and seven year old grandchildren
spend
the night
with her. Years of hospitalizations, slow return, medications and breakdowns,
placements and waiting, worry and no place to live, work and the loss
of work, more illness, and worry about a daughter growing up with one
not
there. Dreams
so long in the waiting being carried into the apartment on the backs
of the delivery men.
There have been times that I have been burning to write to you here,
wanting whatever had touched me or been on my mind to be on yours.
Pushing my upset
at the conditions too many people must endure, demanding that you
worry too. But
today nothing more to say to you than this: Last week a new pull-out
sofa was delivered to Domenic House. Thank You.
Joe Ferry, Bethesda
