It started innocently. The pastries, which usually cost between two and three dollars each, had sat in their glass case all day and were about to be thrown out by my manager. The coffee shop would be getting a new order of them the following morning, and the store’s commitment to freshness meant whatever unsold baked goods were left at the time of closing would be taken out with the trash. The pastry box in his hands bulged with over three hundred dollars worth of muffins and tarts.
“Wait!” I demanded, new to the job and clammy with social responsibility. I’d also recently started my Street Sense internship, and had quickly discovered that researching and writing about homeless issues wasn’t work that stayed in the office at the end of the day. You carry it with you, especially in DC, where the region’s homeless population comprises about fifteen thousand of your neighbors.
“Can I take those?” I asked, calculating how I’d carry the overflowing box to the closest church. My manager obliged, and when my boyfriend met me outside, he seemed unsurprised by my idea.
But when we arrived at the church, it was locked. The box of pastries was slowly collapsing in my hands. We agreed to walk to the nearest park with the expectation of meeting people who would take them, but when we arrived, we only found one man. I started to feel desperate. “Where are all of the homeless people?” I asked, frustrated, before realizing how absurd my question really was. I called the Editor-in-Chief of Street Sense, Mary Otto, for advice on where to take the box, and she recommended the Creative Center for Non-Violence, which was a metro ride away near Judiciary Square.
As we walked to the station, we stopped every few minutes, handing out pastries to individuals who were sitting on sidewalks and sleeping in parks. I placed a croissant in a woman’s bag as she slept on a bench and delivered cinnamon rolls to men sleeping in the lawn. For a moment, I felt like the true Muffin Man, carefully selecting blueberry or bran purely on impulse. The men and women who were awake responded by inquiring about the flavors of muffins and politely asking if it was okay to take another. As I helped a man correctly identify a currant scone, another man who was sleeping facedown in the grass when I placed a muffin two feet from his head awoke. Just as he realized with delight that someone had personally delivered a fresh blueberry muffin to him, I realized he was not at all homeless and was merely taking a moment away from his standard office job. A free muffin is a free muffin.
In another instance, as I tiptoed closer to one sleeping man, I noticed his hand was down his pants. But instead of retreating, I set the muffin down next to the homeless dreamer, admittedly six inches further away than I had placed the others, in a small liberal arts college act of defiance that proclaimed sexual activity should not determine who does and does not eat.
When we finally arrived at the Creative Center for Non-Violence, the box was only half-full, and enough people were gathered outside of the shelter that the box was empty before we reached the door. Personal pastry preferences were discussed and smiles were exchanged, and I went home an hour later than originally intended as full with happiness as I would have been with sugar had I eaten the entire box of goods myself.
Now, a few weeks later, plans are underway to consistently send the pastries where they’re needed each night. The circumstances of my muffin delivery escapade were rare, but the experience revealed common themes of humanity. People prefer different types of pastries but all of them are good. Some things can be enjoyed equally as much regardless of personal condition, and free muffins are almost always hard to resist. Most importantly, a muffin is a muffin and a person is a person, whether they’re over-priced or free or housed or homeless, and each can make a difference, however small, in someone’s life.
