Not long after I lost my job, I started volunteering. In between looking for another job and attending the depressing career transition seminars that came with my severance, I needed something that would help put things in perspective so that I wouldn’t go insane from the indignance of it all. Something to make my own pity party less all-encompassing.

So, I signed up to volunteer for a hunger relief organization that took leftover food from fancy restaurants and gave it to the poor. They also took donated food from grocers and distributed to neighborhoods that could use it. I liked food and cooking and since this was unrelated to what I did professionally it would surely provide some relief from the feelings of age and rage and rejection that were taking a toll on my fragile ego.

One day I helped pack, weigh, and distribute donated produce at a designated location in a neighborhood with a lot of poor people. I showed up early in the morning to work with a team of fellow volunteers to demonstrate a simple, healthy breakfast that could be made inexpensively – with apples and pears, low-fat yogurt, a drizzle of honey, and some oats. While cutting up fruit I didn’t really pay attention to the queue of people stretching beyond where you see the end of the line. When I looked up, I thought of the scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds where Tippi Hedren casually smokes a cigarette outside the schoolhouse – lost in her thoughts – while hundreds of birds quietly gather on the jungle gym. The children in the schoolhouse are singing a song. It’s a creepy scene. It was the sheer number of these people that made me gasp. And they started lining up at 7:30 in the morning.

Tables were organized by produce type – squash, carrots, oranges, and onions. Large bags of these foods were stacked on top of wooden palettes and the piles were at least six feet tall and twice as wide. The onion table looked like it needed a hand – I mean, who wants to work with onions? – so I planted myself there and got down to scooping out onions, putting them in bags, and weighing them into 5 and 10-pound quantities.

For every good onion, there must have been two that were rotten. Mushy, slimy, and moldy. Just how long had they been sitting around? Who donated these? I spent a lot of time picking out the rotten ones and tossing them into a bin that would later get hauled off for composting. A short, elderly Spanish woman, who was also a volunteer, came over and told me not to worry about inspecting each onion – that the recipients would deal with the bad ones themselves – and to just get the bags filled as quickly as possible, pointing to the line of people which still had no end in sight several hours later.

In what seemed to be some kind of cruel joke, amongst the volunteers was a group of 5 or 6 wearing polo shirts with the logo of my former place of employment. They were a cheery bunch, all from the same business unit (but not one that I had ever worked with), happy to be out of the office on a weekday doing altruistic activity that they would probably get some kind of points for in their annual reviews. Ugh. Look at them. So perky and positive. And employed. I wanted to hate them but instead, I walked over and introduced myself. I told them that I had worked at the company for 14 years, but my position was eliminated late last year so here I was trying to find a new calling, make good use of my time off, and have some purpose. Their division also lost people in that round of layoffs and a few of them told me their own stories of being let go at some point in their careers. It’s the new normal. I was just beginning to realize that.

Eventually, the food started to run out. First the oranges and then the squash and carrots. And finally the onions. There were still many people waiting – at least 100. As other volunteers started packing up the tables the people who didn’t get anything rushed over to pick up what had fallen on the ground even though a lot of it had been stepped on and smashed – like pigeons swooping down on bread crumbs. They also went to the bins of rotten produce and started taking out whatever they could salvage. I could not comprehend how this could be happening. In this rich city. In this rich nation.

I took the subway back to my neighborhood, just 12 miles away on the other end of Manhattan. In the broad daylight of a weekday, I am in my sweatshirt covered in bits of flaked onion skin and sneakers smeared with mud and decomposing vegetable matter deeply pressed into the treads as I walked past trendy shops and restaurants full of pretty people without a care in the world. The sound of laughter and clinking silverware and glasses. When I got inside my apartment, the first thing I saw was a basket of perfect onions that I got from the farmer’s market on my kitchen counter the day before. And I burst into tears.

This was the first time that onions made me cry without even cutting into them.