A time for sharing ‘shiny pebbles’
Despite pandemic, we can still tell stories this Thanksgiving
On the overnight shift at PADS, there’s time to share stories.
Before the pandemic shut down the homeless shelter that rotates nightly among a set of south suburban churches, a fellow volunteer told me about the Irish wake he and his siblings threw for his dad, at his dad’s request.
He told how he and his brothers took his dad’s body from the funeral home to his dad’s favorite watering hole, where they participated in one final toast to their physically present yet departed in spirit patriarch.
I can’t vouch that it actually happened, though it was told convincingly. Either way, it was an entertaining story.
Another volunteer, Don Rubins, of Park Forest, is a collector of stories, and is always willing to share them.
“Whenever someone tells stories, especially life stories, I pay rapt attention,” he told me Friday. “I love stuff like that.”
And like a character from his favorite book, “Cannery Row” by John Steinbeck, he has “a weakness for people on the bottom of the scale.” So starting in the 1990s, he’d hike some of the more impoverished neighborhoods of Chicago distributing food and collecting stories.
“I decided to do a bologna ministry,” he said. “I had my dad’s old Army rucksack, and I’d fill it with bologna sandwiches and go around and hand one to people. … If you give them a bologna sandwich, sometimes they’d be willing to talk to you.
“Some of the stories from people on the street, if you
remove the tragedy of the skid down, these are people who had seen the world. One woman had been to Milan. … If you fed them, oh the things you could learn. One gentleman who had been in the Marines had been at Anzio after the war, when they were rebuilding the town. You could almost feel like you were standing there.”
Over the years, Rubins spent time working on other causes too. He got involved with efforts to rescue women and men involved in dangerous domestic violence situations. And he was part of a “ragtag group of about 14 people” who tried to covertly help sex workers get into better situations.
“We called ourselves ‘Children of the Night’ because all of us had a mental age of about 2,” he joked.
Rubins eventually shifted his efforts to PADS — Public Action to Deliver Shelter — most recently working the 3 to 8 a.m. shift once a month at St. Lawrence O’Toole in Matteson.
It was the continuation of a tradition of volunteerism that started when he was very young.
His grandmother, he said, had a role in founding the Selfhelp Home, a nursing home (“you can’t call it that anymore,” he said) for Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from Europe.
“I started when I was 3 being a volunteer grandchild for so many of these people with blue numbers on their arms,” he said, noting his sister had the same job. “They would hold on to us and weep and rock, and rock and weep.”
A few years later, during a service at KAM Isaiah Israel, Rubins heard a sermon by Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf (“also the greatest White Sox fan I ever met,” he said) that solidified his interest in helping others.
“He said we must always remember to keep faith with those who sleep in the dust,” Rubins said. “We didn’t have money, but there are people who are hungry every day, that have been cast off like a wadded piece of paper.”
So he decided to help, starting a lifelong effort that’s been brought to a grinding halt by the pandemic, as well as some grim health news.
Rubins, 61, has kidney failure, a terminal disease, and doctors estimate he has anywhere from a few months to a year left to live, he said.
And as Thanksgiving approaches while the pandemic rages, he’ll be spending the holiday alone, something he puts into perspective by taking a wide view.
“This year, there are going to be a lot of people who are sad, because they don’t have a lot of their beloveds at their table,” he said. “But you know, there’s an opportunity here. With this here gizmo, Zoom, now you can eat with everyone you’d love to sit down with. They can all be there on your computer — all of them! People you’ve hoped to break bread with for so long, but maybe they live far away. Imagine three families of old friends who couldn’t have dinner together. Now they can make three Thanksgivings into one Thanksgiving.”
As for him, “My Thanksgiving is every day. I’m the richest man you ever met. I have more blessings than you will ever know.”
Like many of us at the holiday, and during the pandemic, he’s taking things day by day.
“Every day there’s a possibility of changing the world,” he said, “or an opportunity to do something. You don’t know when it’s coming. It’s exciting.
“I was always the kid who thought the greatest gift you can give someone is a shiny pebble you came upon. Because it’s something you saw, you picked up, you thought of them, and gave it to them. There are a lot of shiny pebbles out there.”