Veteran now does meals on wheels, delivers to seniors
Published Wednesday October 8th, 2008
Joyce Fortune drives up to the first of her three stops Friday morning.
“There we go ... first customer,” she says, almost chuckling, before stepping out, popping the trunk and loading up a plastic tray with ready-made meals for the nearby house’s occupant, Julie McCormack.
It’s another usual day for Blackville’s meals-on-wheels service, except that Fortune isn’t your usual volunteer. At 83 years of age, she’s older than most of the people she delivers to, and she’s been delivering to them for years.
After she’s unloaded the meal — soup, sandwiches, a blueberry muffin and other goodies — she takes a moment to chat with Mc- Cormack, and they have clearly known each other a long time.
“She’s a great lady,” says Mc- Cormack as Fortune leaves for the next delivery, in a manualtransmission car she drives at the speed limit.
Fortune makes three stops that morning, and as many as 10 on other days. Each seems as much a social call as a meal delivery.
Before she even knocks on the doors of the two houses and one nursing home on her rounds, she knows the tales of their occupants, stopping to chat with each before taking off for the next stop.
“It’s nice. I go see people I haven’t seen for ages,” she says.
“It’s no big deal, there’s only a few of them. It’s like just dropping in for a little visit.”
At the home of Norma Mountain, she spends more than a few minutes catching up. Juanita Curtis, a family friend who regularly visits Mountain, describes the elder lady’s anticipation of each meals-on-wheels visit.
“They look forward to the people coming in,” she says. “They enjoy it.”
During the course of the day’s deliveries, Fortune points out Blackville landmarks here and there, including the homes of local notables she knows, and tells a brief story about each.
After working for decades as a custodian at Blackville School, she knows a fair chunk of the town’s residents, although many of the children she watched go through school are a little hard to recognize now.
“You go any place, people remember you, because you’re older,” she says. “But the young ones that would be going to school when I was working there are all grown up now.”
Before even becoming a custodian, Fortune served a stint in the army during the Second World War, joining the service when she was 19, then marrying after the war was over.
She recalls boot camp quite vividly, although all of her service consisted of office work in Canada, despite her enthusiasm to go to the active theatres in Europe and then in the Pacific, as the war was over before she was of age.
“You weren’t of age until you were 21, so there’d be no way,” she recalled.
Even after she retired from being a custodian at 67, she still kept active, volunteering at the Royal Canadian Legion taking orders for memorial wreaths around Remembrance Day, as well as other activities.
The most surprising thing about this petite senior with the curly, saltand- pepper hair are the four motorcycles she says she owned in succession before giving up the last one at the age of 74.
While she recounts that part of her life story, a small gold replica of one, complete with actual spinning wheels, hangs around her neck.
One in particular, she recalls fondly.
“It was almost too big. I’m not very long in the legs,” she jokes.
That hobby would seem typical of the “spry” Fortune, according to Linda Sherrard, who prepares the meals Fortune delivers and coordinates the volunteers at the Miramichi Fellowship Centre, which organizes the meals-on-wheels service.
Sherrard says Fortune is always on the go.
“Winter or summer, she never says no,” she says. “That’s something, especially with the price of gas these days, and her a senior citizen.”
But like most of the praise Sherrard lays on her, Fortune downplays it humbly.
“Heavens, it’s not that far,” she says. “It’s only a little bit, and those people are glad to get their lunches and see you and everything. Makes it all worthwhile. I don’t mind doing it.”
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