May 2009

Jill’s rides

Meals on Wheels & fish on pedals

Photo by Julie Wiatt

For the past 11 years Jill Feasley has made sure that an apartment-dwelling Silver Spring woman gets a freshly cooked noon meal and an afternoon sandwich five days a week. The woman, now 94 years old, invariably escorts the food courier to the elevator and invariably says, “Press ‘L’ because if you press ‘1’ you’ll go to the basement.” But the other day the elevator wasn’t working. The courier headed for the stairs. “No, no,” the woman said firmly. She commenced kicking the elevator door. “I’ll fix it!”

You can see why Jill, who while on Capitol Hill earlier in her career helped see to the reauthorization of the Older Americans Act, enjoys working with the young at heart, and you can imagine Jill herself putting a boot to a door a few decades from now.

In the meantime, Jill has her regular job with Takoma Park’s Meals on Wheels, where, after giving up her Hill life, she started as a volunteer in 1998 and took over as director in 2003. She is raising money for a green roof at the Presbyterian Church, which is one reason she helped organize a massive inaugural party in the church gym. She also took on an artistic mission that got her nicknamed the Snakehead Fish Lady in her Tulip Avenue neighborhood. And that just accounts for the first four months of this year.

Throughout April she followed her routine of one thing on top of another.
After seeing off her husband Kurt Lawson and their two teenagers in the mornings, Jill drove to Zion Lutheran Church on New Hampshire Avenue for the preparation of hot lunches and sandwiches for the 40 local subscribers to the Wheels program, most of them elderly shut-ins. By late morning the food had to be packed into the vehicles of eight couriers, all volunteers. On days when a courier failed to show Jill did the delivering herself.

Afternoons she spent shopping for the next day’s ingredients. She recently found menus dating to 1971, when the program started and which back then featured church-supper staples like lime jello, beef consommé and three-bean salad. These days the menus adhere to a modern nutritional regimen and include such delights as turkey pastrami, kale and lentil loaf.

“Actually I get a lot of compliments, especially for the lentil loaf,” Jill said one recent afternoon, her shopping done, just ahead of rush hour. She told a story about taking her children, Joanie and Kenny, to Meals on Wheels when they were young. “Kenny asked me why he had to come along, and I told him he was lucky to be able to volunteer because for a lot of organizations you had to be much older. Joanie rolled her eyes and said, ‘Leave it to Mom to tell you something like that.’” Jill was taking a brief break in her own kitchen but then made her way to the family garage. There was the Snakehead Fish, about 12 feet long.

Jill and a neighborhood friend, Krista Tretick, had been building it during evenings and weekends with help from their husbands and other neighbors. “It’s a kinetic sculpture,” Jill said. “Or you could call it a racing fish.” The sculpture part, the part that looked like a snakehead with fearsome teeth, was made of chicken wire and stiff plastic. The racing part, the part that had to survive a 15-mile course of mud, sand and macadam in downtown Baltimore, consisted of metal struts and two standard wide-tire bicycles. The kinetic part would be Jill and Krista’s husbands and Kenny and a friend pedaling the bikes inside the belly of the fish.

Because the race had one complicating test, crossing the waters of the Baltimore harbor, the entire contraption had to float. “We made special pontoons out of Styrofoam, and we tested them last week on Lake Artemesia, and they work. They work!” she rejoiced.

For additional ballast and for an aesthetic resembling fish scales they planned to attach hundreds of bottle caps that “have been showing up like zucchini on our doorstep.” Krista had sorted the caps by colors, machine-washed them and drilled holes through the center. The caps were now in bags on the garage floor. Minutes later Krista arrived. The last couple years the two women had made dioramas out of marshmallow peeps for a Washington Post contest but this year they wanted a challenge that would drive them a lot crazier. They went to work with the caps. “We have five days to get it done,” Jill said.

For all the whirligigging Jill iseems unflappable, as when Snakehead entered the harbor on May 2, the day of the race (sponsored by the American Visionary Art Museum). The struts holding the pontoons sheared off, and Snakehead immediately and spectacularly floundered.

But Jill pulled out rolls of duct tape, and the jerry-rigged metal fish made it across to the finish line.