More Than Bread: Ethnography of a Soup Kitchen

6. Loneliness

6 Loneliness Loneliness in life appears to be a driving force in bringing people to the soup kitchen. Loneliness may be conceptualized as a feeling of apartness due to a lack in the quantity or quality of social relationships , which results in an unpleasant feeling and a need for others (Peplau and Perlman 1982). The lives of the guests have often been plagued with losses: of family members; of friends who have had violent, premature deaths; of children who have been removed by the state; of spouses who have left; and of jobs lost or never had. The soup kitchen offers people an opportunity to be surrounded by others and the potential of having some human interaction. The kind of interaction that often tends to take place in the dining room may be thought of as sociability, which is interaction for its own sake, without the emotional impact of long-term relationships (Keenan 1982). The atmosphere of sociability in the dining room occurs because people perceive the soup kitchen as a safe, nondemanding environment and enter the dining room each day in sufficient numbers and for several hours at a time. The safety of the environment is enhanced by the predictability of the routine: coffee and doughnuts are available from 9 A. M. until noon, and there is a hot meal at 12:30 P.M. The guests usually gravitate to "their" table, whether it is toward a loosely knit group of friends or acquaintances, or to a 69 70 More Than Bread table all by themselves. With the exception of people who enter with specific groups of friends, guests of the Tabernacle Soup Kitchen tend not to know each other's names. The soup kitchen offers us an almost infinite number of examples of people in search of ways to alleviate their sense of loneliness. Almost every guest I came to know expressed the desire to meet people as a reason for being in the dining room. In the brief survey reported on in Chapter 5, the majority of the guests cited "for the company" as a reason for coming to the soup kitchen. The following vignettes of guests illustrate some of the most dramatic uses of the soup kitchen as a way of coping with loneliness. The vignettes are grouped by those in which the loneliness of the guest appeared caused by or exacerbated by a major crisis or dislocation before he or she arrived at the soup kitchen, and those in which the guest's life appeared to be characterized by chronic loneliness. Lives in Crisis and Dislocation Sue: Recoveringfrom a Coma Sue was an almost daily soup kitchen regular, who first came in the winter of 1983. She was twenty-four years old, and as described in Chapter 4, had difficulty walking and had a large tracheotomy scar on her neck. She spoke in a dysarthric manner even when sober, and wore clothes that were several sizes too small for her. Sue began coming when she was a resident of the local halfway house for former psychiatric patients. She was to do twenty hours of volunteer work as a child care worker at the soup kitchen, according to rules of the halfway house. Sue was soon asked to leave the house, but remained a soup kitchen regular afterward. Sue had a soup kitchen routine. Each morning she arrived at about ten o'clock, and sat at the table nearest the coffee and doughnuts . This table was usually occupied by older alcoholic men, young white men and women, and black and Puerto Rican men. She would immediately begin to drink coffee, to eat the day-old doughnuts 71 Loneliness (donated by a local bakery), and smoke one cigarette after another. She often played solitaire or chatted with the other people at the table. From our conversations over the next four years, 1 learned that Sue was brought up in a neighboring town, more affiuent than Middle City. She left high school in the ninth grade and traveled all over the country with a drug dealer. At one point she worked in Montana clearing brush for seven dollars an hour. This was her favorite job. She also worked with retarded people in a residential facility. About three years before, Sue had been hit on the head with a lead pipe; this resulted in her being in a coma for three months and in the hospital for...