Light Switch

When Heather our Addi Road chef arrives with the food she’s been preparing all day, something changes at Wednesday Night Lights. Call it a true beginning to the evening, like a light switch, a new mood, a sudden sense of people being together for real – and yet inside a kind of dream you wish was happening everywhere across this country.

Each week at Wednesday Night Lights from 6 till 8pm we provide a free sit-down hot meal at long tables set for dining out in the open. Surrounding the tables are a host of services offering all kinds of free help and support. Tonight that means Street Side Medics taking care of your health, Orange Sky Australia washing and drying clothes and blankets in their mobile laundry van, Marrickville Legal Centre giving advice you need, and 4 Voices helping women negotiate any problems they may have.

Heather’s fine food is critical to it all working well, with anywhere from 100 to 200 people turning up each week at Wednesday Night Lights. Some come because they are hungry; others to shop at our Addi Road Food Pantry, which stays open late to meet the evening, then all of a sudden they’re sitting down and having a warm nutritious meal with us as well. Many come for friendship and another kind of warmth too, something human and safe and sociable.

It takes all day for Heather to create a meal for so many people. Our volunteers at Addi Road help her inside our solar-powered kitchen, a heart factory of good food and good will if ever there was one. Our Addi Road Food Pantry is dependent on this energy – solar powered for the better of the environment; community minded for the better of everyone who lives and walks beside us anywhere in this city.

Heather’s cooking and recipes are not only nutritious, they taste damned good too.

Appropriately enough tonight, there’s a folk band here from The Mens Shed who call themselves Against the Grain.

They do slightly countrified and joyous takes of songs by Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Seekers, Daddy Cool, all kinds of odds and ends that you forgot you know how to singalong with. Till all of a sudden you are indeed singing. Inside yourself if not out loud.

As people line up for their hot meal, Against the Grain launch into a rollicking version of ‘Ferry Across the Mersey’. Not everyone knows it, of course. But there’s a singalong that scatters itself through the crowd as surely as the few stars peeking through the clouds above…

“People around every corner

Seem to smile and say

We don’t care what your name is

We’ll never turn you away”

A rich baritone in the crowd mutters the lyrics and then embraces them full-tilt with the band as they deliver the tune to everyone.

Others make their partial contributions from the dining tables. Lovely rich voices that have not forgotten their old song. A little bit of glitter that comes and goes in the dark.

People eating and talking; getting help and helping one another too – just by keeping company here together. Some hint of change and minor magic in the air for an hour or two.