Open Heart, Open Hand

Ruth Brinker is grandmother incarnate, a balm of memories and sympathies. As she sits at the edge of his messy bed, the young blond man pries the lid off his dinner. An Italian omelet, roast potatoes, broccoli. The cramped hotel room actually smells of home. "Ruth," he says, "I love you."

At that very moment, several dozen volunteers are playing out the same scene in several hundred rooms and apartments all across San Francisco, feeding and cheering men and women with AIDS. These volunteers are the soldiers of Project Open Hand, which Brinker, 66, started in 1985. She and her workers now provide 1,100 meals a day.

Brinker did not set out to become a savior. In 1984 a young architect she knew fell ill. "I'd never had any experience with AIDS," she recalls. "I was appalled at how quickly he became too sick to take care of himself." She and other friends formed a rotating caretaker group. But, occasionally, one would forget about his or her shift, and the dying architect went hungry until the next shift arrived. "I realized then," Brinker recalls, "that there were people throughout the city who didn't have my friend's support."

She founded Project Open Hand with seven "clients." Each day by 5 a.m., she would prowl the produce markets for "distressed" vegetables. She cooked in a church basement and delivered the meals in her battered Volkswagen van. "Some of the people were so emaciated," she remembers, "they would have to crawl to where the buzzer was."

Today the client list grows by almost 100 people every month. In 1986 Open Hand's budget was $70,000. By the end of that year, Brinker realized her next budget would have to be a quarter of a million dollars. "I almost had a heart attack." The 1988 budget was a million dollars -- a figure that demanded constant fund raising. Says Brinker in her oddly tough half-whisper, "You have to go out and beg."

Brinker no longer makes regular deliveries herself. Too many people have died, and it is agony to make new friends and lose them so inevitably. Still, if a client calls late to say he did not get his meal, Brinker will go into the kitchen, cook it and deliver it. When money runs short she uses her own. Sometime this year Open Hand will move to a new kitchen capable of producing 8,000 meals a day. "The money is really, really tight," confides chef Chris Medina. "In the past couple of months, we've been on the verge of going under."

If that happened, more than lives would be lost. On New Year's Eve a year ago, two men, both with AIDS, were sitting in front of the TV set, feeling gloomy and hoping they'd have the strength to stay awake until midnight. Then the doorbell rang. An Open Hand volunteer walked in with a box decorated with streamers and balloons. It contained champagne, pate, cheese, truffles, a hat and a noisemaker. The men broke down and cried. This New Year's Eve Open Hand brought the same treat to everybody on its list.