When a folding table pops up on a sidewalk, it used to be a kid selling lemonade. These days it’s a grown-up selling face masks.
Eileen Purcell of Reno set up her folding table the other day on the corner of Foerster Street and Flood Avenue. She was in town to visit her mom for Mother’s Day and figured she might as well make a few bucks.
Purcell has been cranking out face masks from dress fabric on her sewing machine for weeks. The plain ones cost $10 and the fancy ones $15. The pricier masks include a little pocket to insert a coffee filter.
Some masks had sports team logos on them, no extra charge. Some were made from Army camouflage fabric, although Purcell said she wasn’t sure why she made those. The enemy, during a pandemic, is not susceptible to camouflage.
Adena Friedman stopped by, spent quite a while browsing and bought a mask for $10 and another for $15.
“I was out for a walk,” she said. “I didn’t expect to be buying anything. But these are good masks.”
One secret, Purcell said, is the kind of pipe cleaner she uses for the part of the mask that goes over the nose. The metal in a pipe cleaner helps the mask fit around the nose and reduce the gap. The trick, she said, is to use the thicker kind of pipe cleaner made for cleaning smokers’ pipes, not the thinner kind of pipe cleaner made for kids’ art projects. Fold your pipe cleaner into thirds and wrap it with thread, the way a spider wraps a fly after she catches it. Then the pipe cleaner will stay put when you sew it inside the mask.
“Details are important,” Purcell said.
Purcell said she was trying to earn enough money selling masks on the sidewalk to cover gas money for the Mother’s Day trip. If a kid can sell lemonade and cookies at a sidewalk table, anybody should be able to sell anything. Lemonade is not likely to save lives, she said, but a face mask just might.
“This is America,” Purcell said. “We make things and we sell things and we try to help people.”
Seniors focus on exercise: “Let’s go, everybody! Time to get your blood flowing!”
Once a week, exercise leader Tiana Tanjoca wanders through the parking lot at the Baywood Court senior home in Castro Valley, calling up to the empty balconies and porches above. Lillian! Verna! Margie! Come on out!
Most everything else has been canceled at Baywood Court. The group trips to the shopping mall aren’t happening because the shopping mall isn’t happening. The hot tub is closed, the concert room is closed, the dining room is closed. There are few places to go. The balcony and the porch are about it.
One by one, residents step out onto their balconies and porches at the three-story complex for exercise class in the age of pandemic.
“If you need to hold on to your cane, go ahead!” Tanjoca said, her words booming from a boom box, and more than one person did.
There was shoulder shrugging and arm bending. There was walking in place. There was twisting your neck as if you were trying to see the driver in the blind spot, not the easiest thing to do with arthritis, in a car or on a balcony.
Tanjoca took a short break and stepped aside, to let an ambulance pass. Ambulances come and go at senior homes. All eyes watched it depart.
“I want you to pretend to touch your ear to your shoulder,” Tanjoca said, changing the subject. “Don’t really touch it. Just pretend.”
The exercises lasted about 10 minutes. Harriet Porter said doing them made her feel better.
“I’m 92 years old,” she said. “You have to keep moving. If you’re just going to watch TV, you’re going to vegetate.”
Porter used to be a bowling alley waitress in Los Angeles. Then she moved to Windsor in Sonoma County until three years of wildfires persuaded her to leave a few months ago. She came to Castro Valley to be close to her daughter. Ginger, her Chihuahua, came too.
Fires are something like pandemics, she said. They come, they burn hot, and, with any luck, they die out.
A few porches away, Barbara Horn, 77, took a break from knitting hats and writing letters to join Tanjoca for exercises. She did her knee bends next to a pot of geraniums.
“Most of what I do these days is sedentary,” she said, catching her breath after some knee bends. “Except for this.”
Arf! Meow! Free chow: If a dog is hungry and a dog’s owner is hungry, usually the dog gets fed first.
That’s the way it is, according to the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society, a group that knows the man’s-best-friend thing works both ways.
Fortunately, the shelter, on Ninth Street in Berkeley, just received 13 tons of donated pet food — the largest single gift anyone could remember — so that needy dog and cat owners need not be faced with such a choice, according to shelter spokeswoman Morgan Pulleyblank.
The pet food will be distributed to all comers at the shelter’s twice-weekly free pet food distribution, on Fridays and Sundays, from 8 to 10 a.m. Anyone in need may line up on 6-foot sidewalk marks in front of the shelter and receive a two-week food supply per pet.
The 13 tons, mostly kibble, arrived the other day on two dozen wooden pallets from the Greater Good pet welfare foundation in Seattle.
The food is dry kibble in sacks and moist food in cans and pouches. Recipients and their pets, no matter how finicky, get no choice of flavors or type. As they say when they pass out crayons in kindergarten: You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.
Hungry people, and animals, are less particular than well-fed ones, Pulleyblank said.
The shelter usually gives away two tons of pet food a year. This year, largely because of the pandemic, it is on a pace to give away 10 tons.
Steve Rubenstein is a staff writer for The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF
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