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About the First Interfaith Out of the Cold
Out of the Cold is a program that offers people something to eat, a place to go, and a place to spend the night.
How it got started
St. Peter’s Church in Toronto started an Out of the Cold program in 1987. The Darchei Noam synagogue joined five years later, when the program needed help. There wasn’t enough funding and there were too few volunteers. Sister Susan, the woman in charge at St. Peter’s, prayed to God.
“I knew better than to tell Him what to do, but I had some ideas of what would help — a big donation, a bunch of new volunteers. I never imagined He would send me forty Jews.”
- Sister Susan, talking to Lynda Champagne
How it works
The First Interfaith Out of the Cold shelter is run by volunteers and funded by donations.
I volunteered at the First Interfaith Out of the Cold shelter for fifteen years. Every Thursday during the winter I would walk over to St. Matthew’s Church and head down to the basement.
There were snacks and coffee, and supper for around one hundred and twenty people. About forty‑five guests stayed for the night. The program also offered free nursing care, foot care, and used clothes.
“One year, Christmas Eve fell on a First Interfaith Out of the Cold day. The synagogue volunteers stepped up so church volunteers could have the night off. But the church volunteers showed up in full force! Helping out was a big part of their Christmas tradition.
Sister B opened with a prayer. She asked God to bless the food we were about to eat, the hands that made the food, and the hearts that prompted the hands to do the work. It was lovely. The church volunteers said ‘Ey‑men’ and the synagogue volunteers said ‘Ah‑men’. The church volunteers crossed themselves and the synagogue volunteers smiled. We were all visibly moved.
As Sister B was walking toward the kitchen, I heard her say: ‘Well that wasn’t too bad was it. No Jesus, no Mary, no nothing!’”
- Kathy Sykora
Where it is
The First Interfaith Out of the Cold shelter is based in St. Matthew’s Church, 729 St. Clair Avenue West (just west of Christie Street), in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The sign‑in desk
Questions we ask
What’s your name?
Nancy is signing this guy in, and she says to him, “John Smith, Jim Doe, I like these easy names.”
He answers, “Easy names, but let me assure you, complex personalities.”
“Foster child cartoon” transcript and description
A woman in a long coat and hat comes up to Nancy at the desk, and Nancy starts signing her in.
“What’s your last name?”
“Foster,” the woman answers. “I’ve been a foster child since birth,” she says and she smiles.
“What’s your name?”
“Jack Daniels.”
“Hmm,” I say. “We’ve already got two Jack Daniels here. How about Jim Beam?”
“Yup,” he says. “That’ll do.”
A young couple show up at the sign‑in desk. I ask her what her name is and she just stands and stares at me.
He says, “Please babe, please. I can’t sleep out again tonight, it’s just too fucking cold.”
“Hey, it’s OK,” I say. “You’re in. We just have to fill out this form. You can tell me her name or I can make one up.”
They sign in. He goes to the snack table and comes back with a coffee for me.
What’s your birthday?
Myra says, “Wait! You’re forty? You look like you’re twenty!"
“Yeah, I’m young for my age. My mother says I’m still in my Terrible Twos.”
Are you staying the night?
The kid
“Are you staying the night?”
He says, “I’m hoping you have space for us.”
“For sure,” I answer.
“We just got here from Newfoundland,” he tells me. “We put off leaving because I didn’t want to leave my kid behind. My girlfriend and me kept hoping something would come up. But it didn’t, so the kid’s back there with my ex, and we’re here with twenty bucks left.”
A couple of months later, things have changed
“We’re just here for supper,” he says proudly. “We’ve both got jobs, we saved up first and last, moved in two days ago.”
After months of just coming for supper
“Are you staying the night?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he answers. “My ex got sick and couldn’t make rent. So we sent her our rent money, and now here we are again. No fucking way is that kid going homeless.”
A handsome young man comes up to the sign‑in desk. I get his name and his birthday and then ask if he’s staying the night.
He grins and says, “If you want me to baby, yeah!”
Things we give away
Jelly body bits
Every year after Hallowe’en a local Weight Watchers group would donate candy, so for the first few weeks of the season we’d have some treats to hand out.
Here’s what jelly body bits look like.
“Jelly body bits” transcript and description
A young man in a toque and a hoodie spots the candy on the sign‑in desk.
“Hey!” he says, “Hallowe’en Candy!”
“Yeah, jelly body bits,” I say. “Take two.”
“I need three,” he says. “Two eyes and a liver.”
Lots of candy
Myra and I are testing my theory that putting out candy in a little bowl will keep people from loading up without either of us having to say, “Take two.” It seems to be working.
But then this one guy shows up and just starts stuffing his pockets. I watch until I feel like I have to say, “Whoa, take it easy!”
Myra looks like she’s enjoying not saying “I told you so.”
He stops what he’s doing. He looks like he’s just realized he was doing it. “I’m trying to get off ... this drug,” he says. “It helps to fill up on candy when I start craving.”
“OK,” I say. “I don’t know what you’re going through, but I do know how hard it was to quit smoking, and I imagine this is harder.” I hand him the bowl and say, “Here, have some candy.”
Clothes
The disadvantages of a nice coat
“Nice coat!” I say to a guest.
“Thanks, I found it here,” he says. “It’s great, but it’s really bad for business. People like their bums to look like bums.”
The advantages of a nice coat
The young man at the sign‑in desk is so pale he is almost literally white. He’s shivering and his teeth are chattering. He says, “I fell asleep in the ravine last night just wearing this hoodie, and when I woke up I was covered in snow. I’ve never been this cold.”
We have a bunch of winter coats that were just donated by a manufacturer. Nancy and Myra cover for me while I go in the back with him to look for a coat. We find one that fits, and then he bundles up and sits and shivers for another hour. He warms up slowly. By suppertime he’s charging around the basement with a bunch of young guys.
...
It was so easy to help that guy. It made me think of the day my grandmother discovered the existence of boullion cubes. She had always been an everything‑from‑scratch cook, and boullion cubes seemed like science fiction to her.
She unwrapped a boullion cube and said, “You know, when I was a young girl they used to say someday all food would be like this.” She dropped the cube into a pot of boiling water with a flourish. “Look,” she said. “I made soup.”
Boots
There isn’t any snow on Thursday, but Friday morning we wake up to snow a foot deep. My fifteen‑year‑old son digs out his winter boots. His feet are so much bigger now than when he was fourteen. He wears his running shoes to school and I bring his boots down to Out of the Cold.
I’d never been there on a Friday morning. I walk into the kitchen and ask a guy who is working there what to do with the boots.
“Any chance they’d fit me?” he asks. He holds up a foot. He has boots on, but they have no soles. I can see the entire bottom of his sock.
I say, “Actually, yeah, they might. Here, try this on.”
He puts a boot on. It fits perfectly.
“Wait!” he says. “Are these steel toes?”
“Yeah,” I reply.
“Merry Christmas!” He pulls on the other boot.
The next time I see him is in the spring. He’s part of a demolition crew, loading a skip, wearing the steel‑toe boots.
Concert tickets
Shane says, “Someone donated concert tickets. Steve and me got to go to a CONCERT. It was amazing! It was so beautiful. I could see where all the sounds came from! I could watch the people make it happen. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Myra asks, “What was on the program?”
“I don’t know, but there weren’t any words,” he says. “If I could go to a CONCERT every night, I could get off drugs.” He stops a moment and then he says, “The only thing I didn’t like was there was some asshole standing in front of everybody waving his arms around.”
“That was the conductor,” Myra says. “He’s helping the performers play together.”
“They didn’t need that. Maybe at practice. They knew what they were doing.”
...
Weeks later he’s still gushing about the concert. He tells Myra, “It was better than an orgasm!”
...
After a while, there’s a new topic
“Look at this. It’s the best picture anyone has ever taken of me!” he says, and shows me a mug shot. “It’s from the last time I got arrested. It’s great, eh?”
Coupons …
A guest asks, “What are these?”
“They’re two‑for‑one coupons for McDonalds,” Myra answers. “Take one.”
He looks miserable. “Who’s going to go out for dinner with me?” he asks. “Would you have dinner with me?”
“I would be honoured to go out for dinner with you,” says Myra.
“No!” he says. “You’re way too good for me!”
Nancy cuts in. “No, she’s not.”
I crack up, and another guest asks me what’s so funny. I tell him and he says, “I never imagined you had such a mean sense of humour.”
… and a backpack
I show up with an old backpack and offer it to this guy who carries everything he owns in a plastic grocery bag.
“Thanks, this is great!” he says. “It’s really big. I don’t have enough stuff for this.”
I say, “You know, the amount of stuff you have expands to fill the available storage space. You’ll fill it up for sure.” He nods. I add, “If you had a house, you’d fill that up too.”
He doesn’t say anything, but he looks at me as if I’m completely nuts.
Talking to people
Not what he’s used to
A man I've signed in a hundred times, who has never said one more word than he had to, comes up to the sign‑in desk.
“Is that your mother’s wedding ring?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. I look at the two rings on my right hand. “My mother’s and my grandmother’s.”
“Ha,” he says, walking away. “I’m not used to being right about things.”
She doesn’t love you
“She doesn’t love you” transcript and description
“I don’t see why you keep going after her,” says a man wearing glasses and a hoodie to a bearded guy wearing a toque.
The guy in the toque answers, “Because she loves me.”
“She doesn’t love you.”
“Yes she does!”
“Look,” says the guy with the glasses. “She had you arrested. She won’t let you see your kids. She tells all her friends not to say where she is. That’s not how a woman in love acts.”
“Yeah? And how would you know?”
(brief pause)
“Fuck you.”
The guy in the toque responds with a satisfied grin.
How flat is your hamster?
There was one guest who came in just about every week. When he talked he sounded like he was making sense, with a kind of “we all know this is the way it is” voice.
Me: “Is this how you spell your name?”
Guest: “No! How flat is your hamster?”
Me: “Huh? OK then. You staying the night?”
Guest: “You can’t put a dick in a church.”
Me: “Well, you can stay the night if you like. Help yourself to a snack.”
Guest: “They filled the pantyhose with cold cuts. They put the meat slicer on the toilet and the sandwiches are made of petroleum. There are three thousand elasticated frogs out there.”
The clothing ticket
“The clothing ticket” transcript and description
Myra, a woman with glasses and short, grey, curly hair, says, “Last time he was here, I actually understood what he was saying. I said, ‘You take a clothing ticket so you can look for some gloves,’ and he said, ‘Like the kittens.’ He meant the three little kittens who lost their mittens!
Maybe I’ve been doing this too long ...”
Talking to my husband Bob that evening, I say, “And then he told me that the sandwiches are made with petroleum.”
“But really it’s margarine,” says Bob.
An irreversible wave function collapse
Peter signs in for supper then spends at least an hour trying to explain quantum entanglement to me. I can’t seem to change the subject.
He says patiently, “So, any measurement of a particle’s properties results in an an irreversible wave function collapse of that particle.”
My eyes are starting to cross. I am relieved when someone shows up at the front desk and says, “HEY! Can I sign in?”
I say, “Sure.“
“I have to go to work tonight,” he says. “Can I leave and come back?”
“Yup, just let Jane know. She’s at the end of the table. Want me to see if I can get you a lunch from the kitchen?”
He shouts, “That’s BULLSHIT!”
I say, “Pardon?”
“If you’re too stupid to know what I mean, I’m not going to explain it to you.”
I just look at him.
“HEY JANE!” he shouts.
“Wait a minute please,” says Jane. “I’m talking to someone else.”
“JANE RIGHT NOW!”
In a very frosty but still polite tone, Jane says, “I’m sorry, but you’ll need to wait.”
“So you want to be with the bums?” he says. “Well FUCK YOU! You can suck my cock.” He looks over at me and says, “You too, you fucking church lady.”
He slams out the door.
There is a loud silence.
Peter says, “You’re not really a church lady, are you?”
“No, really not,” I answer.
“I’ll go tell him,” says Peter. Then he thinks for a second and says, “Maybe I’ll wait. I don’t think he’s in a very receptive mood.”
Talking to God
Jesus tells me what happened
Talking to Bob about my afternoon at the sign‑in desk, I tell him about this guy who showed up and asked if I was Jewish. I said yes, and then he told me he was Jesus. He said he was betrayed by Peter.
“That’s not what happened, right?” I ask Bob. “Wasn’t it Judas?”
Bob says, “Well, He would know.”
God speaks to Jacqueline
Jacqueline comes back after a year away.
“Jacqueline, you’re back!” I say. “I’m so glad to see you! You’re looking really well.”
“Yeah, I feel great,” she says. “I haven’t used crack in more than a year. I’m housed, my kids are talking to me, I don’t even miss it. It was like God reached out and touched me.” She smacks her head really hard to demonstrate. “He spoke to me, and He said, ‘Hey, cut that shit out!’
So yeah, I’m just here to see if I can find a winter coat.”
Leaving
Gunnar freezes to death
Michael is near tears. “People choose their own lives but it’s awful thinking of him going that way.”
“Honour his memory” transcript and description
Sheree works with Dixon Hall. She looks at Michael and says, “Here’s how you honour his memory. Don’t drink tonight. If you choose your own life, choose to stop drinking.”
Nothing but this
“Nothing but this” transcript and description
Sheree says, “He called me his dark chocolate. On Valentine’s Day he said he was sorry, he had nothing to give me. And then he dropped his pants and said, ‘Nothing but this.’ The other Dixon Hall staff stepped in front of me. The guests all laughed. He was so drunk.
He came back the next day and apologized. He didn’t remember what he did, but people told him.
Now he’s gone. And I’m sad.”
Noah speaks to Myra
Noah has been coming in every week during the winter, as far back as I can remember. He never speaks and he signs his name with an X. We know he can actually talk, because every few months he starts shouting at people.
Myra likes this guy a lot. Every time he comes in, she greets him really warmly and says something like, “How are you liking this weather?” or “I hope you’re doing well!” Noah nods. This goes on for years.
And then one day he walks up to the desk and says, “Good afternoon, Myra. How are you this fine winter’s day?”
And we never see him again.
Rejoining normal society
Dale stands up at the front of a small room at Darchei Noam and says:
“My name is Dale and I’m an alcoholic and an addict. I was homeless for five years. What gave me the idea it might be possible for me to become part of normal society again was the courtesy I was treated with at the Out of the Cold sign‑in desk.”
Dale looks over at Myra and me and nods.
I am stunned. I had no idea.
