Scout sews goodwill with mass of masks
A 14yearold Menlo Park boy is on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout, thanks to his twin sister, his grandma’s sewing machine and 40 yards of bright pink fabric.
“I didn’t really want pink,” said Parker Brown, “but it was the only color they had left.”
Parker, an eighthgrader at Hillview Middle School, was trying to dream up a service project that would help him qualify for the top rank in scouting when he heard that the Ronald McDonald House at Stanford Children’s Hospital had run out of face masks for its clients.
“I had to do something,” Parker said.
He talked his twin sister, Madison, into showing him how to use the sewing machine. He crowdfunded enough money for an online fabric order. He recruited five dozen friends and neighbors to help. He copied the sewityourself face mask patterns from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.
And he and his small army started sewing. At first Parker’s masks didn’t look like the ones in the pictures.
“The straight lines were curved and the thread was all bunched up and messy,” Parker said. “Those are the masks I kept for myself. You can’t donate those to people.”
Madison showed her brother what he was doing wrong. She’s one minute older than he is, Parker said, and she doesn’t let him forget it.
Pretty soon Parker got the hang of things, and he and his pals sewed on. One hundred pink masks, then 200, then 500. When he had run out of fabric and volunteers, he had a grand total of 1,280 mostly pink masks. Not just pink but, as it said on the fabric label, “bubble gum pink.”
That’s OK, Parker said. The virus can’t read.
The other day, he and his father, Brent, dropped off the masks at the Ronald McDonald House, and a funny thing happened. Parker said that making the masks turned out to be a much bigger deal to him than making Eagle Scout.
“I don’t really know how to explain it,” he said. “Helping the community when it needs help. That’s important. And it makes you feel good. I never felt anything like that before.”
Hold the chicken lips: A 75yearold veteran educator had to move out of her house for two months to make it happen, but a longstanding San Francisco summer school enrichment program has been saved.
But there’s no chicken lips and lizard hips this year.
Rebecca Cherny has run the SummerGATE (Gifted and Talented Education) program every summer for 40 years, holding kidfriendly classes in such topics as chemistry, math, theater, cooking, fencing, paper airplanes, belt making and chess.
She usually rents a San Francisco elementary school to do it. This year, the San Francisco Unified School District told her — with only days to spare — that because of the pandemic she would need a new spot.
“It all happened at the last minute,” Cherny said. “I was on the phone for days, making hundreds of calls to every school I could think of.”
With time running out, Holy Name School in the Sunset District agreed to host the program — providing Cherny cut the enrollment to about onetenth its usual size and make it available only to the children of essential workers.
She also had to agree to have someone stand at the front door of the school every morning and take the temperature of every arriving kid. That someone turned out to be her.
Because of the increased risk, Cherny figured she had better move out of her own house for two months and rent a nearby apartment to reduce the chance that she might transmit the virus to her 78yearold husband, Robert.
It was a small sacrifice, the couple agreed, to save a program that has served more than 20,000 kids over the years.
What about the chicken lips and lizard hips?
Those are lyrics of one of countless singalong songs that started each SummerGATE day. The smaller size of the program meant the music and the chicken lips had to go. but they’ll be back next summer, Cherny vowed.
For $2.10, anyone can be a robber baron: Riding BART used to mean hoping for an empty seat. Now it means riding in an empty car.
After avoiding BART for months, this reporter and his bicycle boarded a train at the Dublin/Pleasanton Station. BART was expected to lose $600 million by the end of the next fiscal year and has two brand new South Bay stations bereft of paying customers, so the agency could use any fare it can get.
A mask is required, and disinfectant is a good idea. Traditionally, many BART riders have carried small bottles of alcohol for medicinal purposes. Now more than ever.
BART is eerie as a “Twilight Zone” episode. Leaving the station, the last car in the train was empty. No acrobats or dancers. Nobody pulling up seat cushions to check for wayward coins. No one else at all. The lone passenger and his bicycle felt like a 19th century robber baron in his own private railroad carriage.
All the way to Castro Valley, autos whizzed by outside the window. Speed limits still apply on BART, even if they have become matters of opinion on Interstate 580.
In Castro Valley, another passenger boarded the car. Glances were exchanged, eyes visible just above mask level. All these empty seats over here are mine, his glance said, and all those over there are yours. In San Leandro, a third passenger got on, wiped down his seat and sat exactly in the middle of the car. This was serious stuff, so why did it feel like gradeschool classmates trafficking in cooties?
At every station came the announcements directed at nonexistent passengers: Transfer. Board the Oakland airport shuttle. Cross over the platform. Nobody did. A lot of people talk to themselves in public these days. No reason a BART operator can’t do it, too.
The car emptied out for the ride beneath San Francisco Bay. Usually it’s impolite to speak on the phone while riding BART, but not if no one else is around. It’s one of those ifatreefallsintheforest things. All alone, 135 feet beneath the bay, yelling through a face mask over the various BART squeals and shrieks to a friend on the other side of the country. Only in the remarkable year of 2020.
In downtown San Francisco, at the height of the afternoon rush hour, three people boarded. They spread out the way a capful of bath oil spreads out in the tub. Still, it was a good enough reason in 2020 to get off the train, grab a squirt of hand sanitizer from the dispenser and go outdoors where all the social distances were.