Tuesday, January 13, 2009
When you boil it down, much as you would a few industrial-sized pots of spaghetti, volunteering is the act of pouring time into a cause. Whereas normally you’re trading minutes for dollars or entertainment or some other commodity, there’s nothing changing hands here, at least overtly, and sure enough what I culled from this weekend was intangible but valuable: a different way of thinking, along with a better understanding of why I volunteer so rarely.
I went with the Professor to a shelter for recovering alcoholics on Saturday, not to discuss with the tenants how much I dislike drinking, nor to ponder why every bartender mysteriously runs out of mint leaves whenever I order a mojito, or why I shouldn’t tell those same bartenders to march out back and grow me a few goddamned sprigs, but to serve lunch. That’s it. A good ol’ fashioned spaghetti plate. We were merely cooking a meal, not saving the world, and I was pleased to find the experience much as I pictured it, simply by taking past volunteer work and overlaying some foodservice memories on top of it.
Initially I tried preparing the pile of ground beef in piecemeal, hastily darting from one quadrant to the next, until it was revealed to me that flattening out the whole business would be far more elegant. It was a revelation, a reminder to reduce reality to its main ideas. I was preoccupied with browning every inch, when I should’ve viewed it as a gigantic burger. I had gained a handy new thought pattern. And it’s always been about the beef, I suppose. I remember clocking in grill time at the dining hall in college and needing to make, say, a dozen cheeseburgers. My inclination was to assemble them individually. The preferred way to do it, though, was to lay out twelve pieces of bread, then slap on twelve patties, then the cheese, and so on. It was this idea of thinking in layers, and it’s proven repeatedly useful since then.
It was also refreshing to take a break from the corporate mindset, where reports and crazy numbers fly every which where, and measure progress differently. Obviously I wasn’t whipping up rosemary-seasoned flank au jus here. Just seven pounds of beef. Metrics for success? I counted two: browned beef. And nobody dies from eating the browned beef. I’m still standing after finishing a plate, plus enough days have elapsed without any dire phone calls from the shelter, so I can safely declare mission accomplished.
Having said all this, when am I going back? Tough to say. One reason for why I tend to avoid volunteering is a potential allergy to that ooey-gooey feeling of camaraderie. It’s, like, I just want to brown this meat and dish out some lunch, you know? I don’t want to empathize with the other volunteers or chat about my aspirations or engage in small talk about where I’m from. But I realize I’m the odd duck out here. Community. It’s the Rubik’s Cube with the same color on every side.