Forty-Two Jars

Aidan Merritt puts the jars on the belt in threes.

He has done it on the third Sunday of every month, in the second checkout line from the produce aisle at the Kroger on Bardstown Road in the Highlands neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, at two-fourteen in the afternoon, since a rainy Sunday in the October of 2018 — three weeks and a day after his mother Elizabeth Callahan Merritt sat down at the small pine kitchen table of the small blue farmhouse on Miles Road outside Bardstown, forty minutes south, put her head in her hands, and did not put it back up.

Elizabeth was sixty-two.

She had, from a warm Sunday in the June of 2007, been the Sunday sorter at the small Nelson County affiliate of the same food bank Aidan is driving the jars to this afternoon. In the drawer under the toaster of the small blue farmhouse on Miles Road, in a plain green spiral notebook her sister Colleen bought her at the Rite Aid on Third Street in the January of 2010, are eleven years' worth of small careful lines in her handwriting: 3/17/13 — 41 jars PB, 28 mac & cheese, low on tuna. 6/22/14 — 39 PB, need to call Roger about the summer gap. On the last used page, dated the fourteenth of October, 2018, six days before she died, in the same small careful hand: ask Aidan to bring 42 next month — school out for fall break the third week.

Aidan found the notebook on a warm Wednesday afternoon in the November of 2018, in the drawer, under the toaster, folded once around a grocery receipt from the Kroger on Third Street.

He has, since a rainy Sunday in the October of 2018, brought forty-two.

What Melinda scans on the belt

The cashier, Melinda Ivy Barnett, has been ringing him up since the Thanksgiving week of 2020, when the store rehired her after the first shutdown. She used to ask, in the second and third months, whether he was hosting a class or something. She stopped asking in the winter of 2021, on the Sunday he told her, quietly, over the last three jars, that his mother had died on a Saturday in the October of 2018.

She scans them now in the same soft even rhythm she scanned them the first Sunday of the January of 2021. Forty-two jars of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter, one small carton of Chobani vanilla he will eat in the car on the way, a plastic clamshell of red grapes for his father Tom in the afternoon, and a small yellow bag of Werther's Original his father has kept in a cut-glass dish on the coffee table of the tall brick house on Cherokee Parkway since a Christmas in 1987.

The total on the little screen is one hundred and twenty-six dollars and forty-eight cents.

Aidan pays in a debit card his mother co-signed for him at the Central Bank on West Main Street in Bardstown in the August of 2010, the summer he left for the University of Louisville. He is wearing, as he has worn on these Sunday runs since a Sunday in the spring of 2019, a faded gray Bardstown High Tigers Marching Band t-shirt his little sister Nora mailed to him in a padded envelope from the small blue farmhouse, along with a note in Elizabeth's own handwriting she had found in the spiral notebook on top of the fridge: bring the peanut butter, honey — I'll get the sorting done Sunday.

Melinda hands him the receipt. He folds it once and puts it in the front pocket of his wallet, where it will stay until the second Saturday of the following January, when he mails twelve small folded receipts in a plain manila envelope to a small tax office on Bardstown Road that has done his family's returns since the spring of 1994.

What the intake sheet on the clipboard at Fern Valley says

Aidan drives, twelve minutes south on I-264, to a small tan warehouse behind a body shop on Fern Valley Road, and pulls into the third bay from the left.

The intake volunteer — a retired middle-school principal named Denise Ivy, who has Sunday-shifted since the June of 2016 — waves him in without looking up.

Hey, Aidan, she says. You want a sticker?

Just the receipt, Miss Denise. Same as last month.

She writes, on the second-to-last line of the third page of a clipboard the foundation office has been photographing and archiving into its donor database on the second Tuesday of every month since the November of 2019, A. Merritt — 42 jars Skippy PB — 8/9.

That is the whole record.

What the foundation office has, on the same afternoon at three-oh-two

Somewhere on the second floor of a small brick foundation office two blocks from Cherokee Park, on the same Sunday afternoon at three-oh-two, the record for A. C. Merritt reads as follows.

Address: 1418 Everett Avenue, Apt. 3B, Louisville, KY 40204. Donor type: In-kind. Giving history: Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter, 42 jars monthly since 10/2018 (~$126/mo). Wealth screen: Modest. Renter. No public real estate. Employer: Jefferson County Public Schools — 8th-grade band. Priority: Tier 5. Do not upgrade. No visit path. Mail-only.

There is no field on the record for the reason there are always exactly forty-two, which is a small careful line, on a Sunday in the October of 2018, in a plain green spiral notebook in the drawer under the toaster of a small blue farmhouse on Miles Road outside Bardstown.

There is no field on the record for Elizabeth Callahan Merritt, who Sunday-sorted at the Nelson County affiliate of the same food bank from a warm Sunday in the June of 2007 until a Sunday in the October of 2018.

There is no field on the record for the passenger seat of an eight-year-old silver Subaru Outback on a two-lane road outside Bloomfield in the fall of 2017, in which Elizabeth told her son, plainly, that forty-two was the number that got a small country pantry through a month with the school out on break.

There is no field on the record for the second pew, pulpit side, at the eight-thirty Mass at St. Francis of Assisi Parish on Bardstown Road, where Aidan's father Thomas Everett Merritt has sat every Sunday of his adult life since a Sunday in the fall of 1979, and where a small brass plate at the lower left corner of the twelfth Station of the Cross, installed in the spring of 2019, reads she called the roll on Sunday.

There is no field on the record for the fact that Tom Merritt is sixty-eight, retired for three years from a small Louisville distiller you have heard of, and sitting on the far end of an estate his accountants at a small firm on Frankfort Avenue would, if you asked them plainly, describe as mid-eight-figures.

There is no field on the record for the fact that in the March of 2019, when the parish council chair — a woman Tom had known since the second grade at St. Agnes — put on his kitchen table a printed one-page appeal on ivory paper with a QR code in the bottom right corner and a photograph of a stock pantry aisle on the cover, he read it once, said Meg, this is a beautiful thing, tell Sister Josephine I'll think it over, and put the paper in the small pewter tray by the front door — where it has, in the six and a half years since, quietly not been thought over.

The paper is still in the tray.

The person on your receipt is not always the gift

Here is a small thing the sector has been quietly getting wrong for twenty years.

The person on your monthly receipt is not always the gift.

Sometimes — often, if you are a food bank in a small city with a good hospital and an old distillery and a wide belt of two-lane roads through the horse country south of town — the person on your monthly receipt is the messenger.

The messenger is the thirty-four-year-old middle-school band director in the Bardstown Tigers t-shirt, buying the jars in threes at the Kroger on Bardstown Road at two-fourteen on the third Sunday of every month, who has been, without anyone at your office ever noticing, quietly holding open a small warm second row on the pulpit side of a church on your city's main street.

The gift is his father.

Not because his father would not have written the check on his own. Because when the paper landed on the kitchen table in the March of 2019, it was on ivory paper with a QR code in the bottom right corner, and it did not know that Elizabeth had died in the October of 2018, and it did not know she was a Sunday sorter at the small Nelson County affiliate from the June of 2007, and it did not know her son had been driving the jars down from the Highlands on the third Sunday of every month since three weeks and a day after her funeral.

It began Dear Friend.

The industry teaches you to look at Aidan's record and see modest, in-kind, tier 5, do not upgrade. It teaches you not to look at Tom's record at all, because Tom's record — since you have never asked him for a dollar and he has never given you one — is not in your system.

The whole discipline is smaller and warmer than the industry has been telling you.

It is to notice that the young man buying the peanut butter in the same t-shirt his mother sent him in 2019 is not, and has never been, doing it for a tax receipt.

What Rōmy sees at three-forty-one

Rōmy reads the small papers.

It reads, on a warm Wednesday morning in the second week of August, at eight-fourteen, Elizabeth Callahan Merritt's obituary on page eleven of the Kentucky Standard of the third week of the October of 2018 — the one that names her eleven years of Sunday sorting at the Nelson County affiliate and asks, in the last line, that any remembrances be sent to Dare to Care in Louisville. It reads the small paragraph on the fourth page of the St. Francis of Assisi parish bulletin of the eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time in the June of 2019 that describes the small brass plate at the lower left corner of the twelfth Station of the Cross. It reads a small line on the Bardstown Kiwanis newsletter of the spring of 2020 that lists Aidan under volunteers, annual middle-school food drive. It reads, on a members-only page of a Kentucky distillers' trade association website Tom's assistant helped him build a profile on in the winter of 2024, one small line under service that reads Chair, Elizabeth Merritt Memorial Bourbon Ball Committee, since 2019.

Then, at three-forty-one on that same Wednesday afternoon, it puts on the desk of a twenty-seven-year-old development associate at the Fern Valley office, a woman named Jasmine Prewitt, a single sourced page.

A. C. Merritt (Aidan), our monthly in-kind Skippy PB donor since 10/2018, is the son of Elizabeth Callahan Merritt (d. 10/2018) — an eleven-year Sunday sorter at our Nelson County affiliate whose obituary named this organization as her memorial. His father Thomas E. Merritt (retired VP, Louisville distiller; mid-eight-figure estate) sits in the second pew, pulpit side, at the 8:30 Mass at St. Francis of Assisi on Bardstown Road and has, in the seven years since Elizabeth died, chaired a Bourbon Ball committee bearing her name. Suggested: one plain cream card, this week, in your own hand, to Aidan at 1418 Everett Avenue, Apt. 3B — no reply envelope, no ask, no case for support — thanking him for the jars; mentioning his mother by name once; mentioning the third Sunday once; and asking whether he would meet you for a coffee at Please & Thank You on Baxter some Saturday morning in September. Would you like a draft, in your own voice?

The card goes out on Tuesday.

Aidan reads it on Thursday, at the kitchen counter of the third-floor walk-up on Everett Avenue, out of a green Nalgene his mother gave him for band camp in the July of 2005.

He sits with it for a long quiet minute.

Then he calls his father.

We are not the pew

Rōmy is not the second pew, pulpit side, at the eight-thirty Mass at St. Francis of Assisi Parish on Bardstown Road.

Rōmy is not the plain green spiral notebook in the drawer under the toaster of the small blue farmhouse on Miles Road. Rōmy is not the faded gray Bardstown Tigers Marching Band t-shirt, or the cut-glass dish of Werther's caramels on the coffee table of the tall brick house on Cherokee Parkway, or the two-lane road outside Bloomfield in the fall of 2017.

Rōmy is the small careful page a good listener would have written for Jasmine Prewitt on a Wednesday afternoon in the August of 2026, if a good listener had been sitting in that second pew for seven years, and in the passenger seat of the Outback in the fall of 2017, and at the intake table on Fern Valley Road every third Sunday since a rainy October in 2018.

The whole product is a smaller job than the industry has been trying to sell for twenty years.

It is also, with a great deal of warmth, the whole job.

A small assignment for the officer reading this on a Sunday

Before the peanut butter for the September school-supply drive comes off the shelf, do one small unglamorous thing this week.

Pull, out of your CRM, the ten smallest recurring in-kind donors of the last five years. Not the tier ones. Not the wealth-screened ones. The ones your monthly report has been filtering out — the jar-of-peanut-butter people, the loaf-of-banana-bread people, the box-of-diapers-on-a-Tuesday people.

Read the obituary column of the local paper for the month the giving started.

You will find, on more Sunday afternoons than the sector has been telling you, a small handwritten line on a notebook page under a toaster in a small blue farmhouse on a two-lane road, and a rainy Sunday in an October, and a thirty-four-year-old band director in a Bardstown Tigers t-shirt who has been, without anyone at your office ever noticing, quietly holding open a small warm second row on the pulpit side of a church on your city's main street.

Then, from your own kitchen table, on a plain cream envelope with a real stamp — write him one page in your own hand.

Do not ask him for anything.

Say his mother's name once. Say the third Sunday once. Sign it warmly.

Ask, at the very end, whether he would meet you for a cup of coffee at the bakery on his corner some Saturday morning in September.

Mail it Tuesday.

The forty-two jars will be on the belt at the Kroger on Bardstown Road on the third Sunday of September at two-fourteen, the way they have been on the third Sunday of every month since a rainy Sunday in the October of 2018.

The messenger has been waiting.

Turn to him. ♡