V is for Volunteering---From Phone Banks to Mahjong Tables

 

Volunteering seems like a no‑brainer for the A to Z Challenge. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few others pick it too. After all, opportunities to volunteer outnumber the do‑gooder types willing to work hard for no money. I'm not sure if I’ve done my share over the years, but I know I’m nowhere near the level of a certain cousin who has always been the Angel of Good Deeds in our family. Her church and the local election board are lucky to have her lifelong devotion. There may be more than one angel lurking on my mother’s side of the family tree. I just don’t know. My oldest niece is a close contender. 

But we do have a very famous volunteer in the family tree. If you like American Revolutionary War history, you might recognize her name: Mercy Otis Warren, the first person to write a history of that war. She was also a ghostwriter for several key men who ended up signing the Declaration of Independence. She knew people in high places, and their correspondence is well preserved. Not so well preserved are the pamphlets she wrote—the ones handed out in the streets to whip up sentiment against the King of England.

My volunteering is a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to my cousin and niece, let alone Mercy. Still, I like to think the political posts I’ve written over the years may have inspired or educated someone. And there were those years in the ’50s when I was a teenager working the phone banks for the Democratic Party on election day. My dad got me into that gig through his union.

My next stint came when I joined a sorority, Beta Sigma Phi. It wasn’t the kind of sorority people picture—no frat houses, no keg parties. It was service‑oriented. Our parties involved tea cups, finger sandwiches and brainstorming ways to serve the community. Back in the ’60s, BSP was a big deal, known for its philanthropy. According to their archives, they “created their own International Funds that donate millions of dollars to health research groups, hunger projects, and other worthwhile causes.” My most vivid memories are of the secret pledge ceremonies, where you were likely to get your fingers burned by hot wax dripping from the candle you held.

In the early ’70s, I volunteered at Planned Parenthood. Mostly I helped with monthly mailings — probably fundraising and updates on the long road to Roe v. Wade. It’s hard to believe those rights are being eroded after all these years. I had known a girl who died days after getting a coat‑hanger abortion, at her father’s insistence—he was also the father of her baby. It was all in her diary. Back then, and even more so now, I believe that abortions should be safe, legal, and rare.

I’ve never claimed to be an altruist selflessly bounding from one good cause to the next, and the ’80s and ’90s proved it. But shortly after the turn of the century, I made up for lost time when I started working for a large website for stroke survivors and caregivers. I mentioned this in an earlier post, so I won’t repeat the details, except to say I worked long hours—many in the middle of the night. My boss was a paraplegic who typed with a forehead pointer and he had worked for NASA before his stroke. But he was demanding, and no matter how many hours I put in, he wanted to pile on more and more responsibilities onto my shoulders. I finally had to quit for my own well‑being. 

A few months later he tried to stop me from writing caregiver articles elsewhere, claiming he had taught me everything I knew. But my caregiving knowledge came from caring for Don and being present at every single one of his therapies and treatments. My x-boss didn’t win the cease‑and‑desist order. Still, it was a sad ending for a relationship that lasted almost six years. 

 Next came a 3-4 year run with a Red Hat Society Chapter that myself and other woman started and we all tried our hands had entertaining at Assisted Living facilities, helping them do arts-and-craft projects at holidays. The chapter grew and so did the length of their fun outings and I had to drop out because I couldn't leave Don alone more than two hours. 

I didn’t volunteer again until after Don died. I answered a call for help at a small‑town museum. I was lonely and thought it might help me make friends. But everyone there had grown up together, and while they were nice, I always got the jobs that required working alone. At the anniversary of my first year, I quit and I didn't try volunteering again until I took over the mahjong group in the Independent Living building where I live now. I taught classes and built the group up and two years ago I organized our first tournament with our sister campus. So no, I’m not the family’s Angels of Good Deeds (both of whom I greatly admire, by the way). But I do keep the Mahjong group running, and around here, that counts for something. ©

U is for Unexpected Joys—the Ones that Sneak up on You

U is a hard letter to use to inspire a post for the A to Z Challenge but we’re getting closer to the finish line so I can’t quit now. The first thought that popped into my head was The Ugly Truth—the movie, not truths about my life that are ugly. I hope I don’t have too many of them and if I don’t go looking for them I can’t find them. But other than saying The Ugly Truth is one of my favorite movies because I love the sexual tension between Mike (Gerard Bulter) and Abby (Katherine Heigi) what more is there to say about this 2008 film other than apparently I’m not the only one who loves it enough to watch every time it comes on TV. It was a commercial success taking in 205 million and only cost 38 million to make.

But I will reveal one ugly truth. I resorted to asking my MS AI Copilot, Jasper, for one-word prompt suggestions to write about. He/it came up with a list of nine topics. For example, U is for Underestimated or it’s for Unreliable Narrators. Uninvited Guests. Utter Nonsense and Unexpected Joy. At first glance none of these seemed to fit my theme of the humans, habits, hidden joys and heartaches that shaped my world. But on second glance I found my Bingo! I could make Unexpected joys work.

And because Jasper is programmed to never give a simple list or quicky answer when he can write an entire monologue about whatever you asked, he expanded on what exactly I could pull out of my writer’s tool box. This is what AI said: “Jean, this one has your name all over it. You could write about the small, ridiculous, delightful things that happen in community life—Mahjong surprises, a neighbor’s one‑liner, a Toby Keith song drifting through the dining room, a forgotten object turning up in a drawer. It’s warm without being sentimental.”

Nope, I'll come up with my own unexpected joys. Thank you very much. And I did. Here are four of my unexpected joys:

Lemon Meringue pie. We have a pretty good chefs here at my CCC but they don’t offer much for desserts. The wait staff rarely even mentions them because they are mostly young high school kids who are working their first jobs and—my theory is—they’ve figured out if we don’t order them they get to go home earlier. A fellow resident and I have a running joke going of asking nightly if they have lemon meringue pie, knowing the answer is always no. Then it happened. A waitress came running up to our table and proclaiming we have Lemon meringue pie and she’s been saving two pieces for us. If we were allowed to tip, she would have gotten a good one for giving us both an unexpected joy.

Another unexpected joy also revolved around a dessert. It’s not unusual for people in our Independent Living apartments to bake and share their bounty with neighbors—in building two and I live in building one and no one here seems to use their ovens. One day I got a knock on the door and opened it to a resident from building one holding a plate of warm, peanut-butter cookies. She had heard me say that it was my favorite. For her to take those cookies down the elevator, across the lobby, through the piazza, key herself into my building, and track down my apartment—that was unexpected. But when I bit in to one I was quite sure she’d used the same recipe my mom did when I was growing up. My joy eating those cookies can’t be measured.

Another unexpected joy also invoked good memories. I only listen to the radio in the car, and since I don’t drive much I don’t hear a lot of music. Last week I had to go to the sleep lab and when I started my Chevy Trax Willie Nelson was blasting out, On the Road Again. When my husband was alive and we’d go on vacation or to someplace fun on the weekend he had that song first on a play list of road trip music. Hearing that song quite by happenstance brought unexpected joy. Though there were a few years when it brought tears to hear it out of the blue.

Side note here: Long time followers of my blog might want to know that I slept like a baby in the sleep lab and it resulted in me getting a BIPAP. Mid May after I've seen all the specialists involved in my search for a good night's sleep, I'll write a post about it. 

The last unexpected joy I’ll share is an oldie but the best unexpected joy in my life. First the back story: When my mom passed away I held back a small amount of her ashes and I kept them in a miniature Tupperware bowl attached to a key chain, but somehow it got lost when I moved after Don’s stroke. I keep hoping against hope they’ll turn up but they didn’t. For twelve years. I was looking for something else altogether and I found it in a box of keepsakes from my childhood that I got out to show my brother. When I pulled the little bowl out, he said he hadn't seen me that happy in a long time. Back when I moved I must have put it in the box for safe keeping. It was safe alright...and lost for over a decade.

Even though the prompt I used for the letter U didn’t come from within my aging brain, I think AI’s suggestion did a pretty good job of pulling the warm fuzzy moments out of me. I guess that’s the thing about unexpected joys—they don’t care where the prompt (or the joy) comes from. I’m just glad they showed up for me to write about. ©

T is for Toys—A Road Back to Childhood

Toys was an easy pick for my letter T in the A to Z Blogger Challenge. I did consider writing about the tornado that wiped out my husband’s entire family farm when he was a teenager, but those memories are documented in a past post. That tornado—his family’s second—killed 24 people, injured over two hundred, stayed on the ground for 39 minutes, and carved a 14‑mile path of destruction. It was also the reason my husband spent his entire adult life trying to buy back the toys of his youth. And then some.

If you’ve ever seen the TV series Hoarders, you already know that most hoarders have major losses in their lives coupled with untreated depression. Their common thread is loss—loss that drives them to surround themselves with whatever they collect, be it trash or treasures. Another contributing factor is insecurity so deep most of us can’t understand how they can live that way.

Don was not a hoarder like you see on that show. But he could have been—would have been—if he hadn’t had years of treatment for depression. His thing was collecting: road maps, coins and currency, gas and oil memorabilia. And his gateway “drug” was buying back the antique toys similar to what he and his brothers once owned, the ones that flew over the fields and woods the day of the tornado.

By the time we met, I was collecting antiques too. I started with furniture I restored and used, then I moved on to smaller things—like filling in the missing pieces of the dish set my folks used at their cottage. I also had (and still have) marbles, Cracker Jack toys and wooden nickels. By the time I moved out of the house after Don died, we had a library room full of well‑organized “smalls” in showcases and collector boxes. Some might have called it hoarding; most people labeled us collectors because everything was clean, researched, and neatly displayed. Visitors often said coming to our house was like going to a museum. A friend once gave Don a retractable pointer as a joke because he loved giving tours of our “museum.”

After Don died, it took me two years to downsize—two years of selling things on eBay, hauling boxes to an auction house and selling through an antique mall where we’d been vendors for years.

But I will say this: we never met another vendor who didn’t have at least a few hoarder tendencies. Don’s basement and garage before we married were stuffed, but never as bad as the hoarding situations you see on TV. Don had a method to his madness, and I can already hear someone in the cheap seats of Bloggerland saying, “Sure. All hoarders say that.” But not many hoarders can say their widows sold one bread‑box‑sized item for $19,000 and a half dozen more for $4,000 to $7,000. He studied the collectibles he loved and had the disposable income to buy what he knew would go up in value.

Not everything did go up, of course. As kids we both collected stamps, and it was hard to even get face value out of those. I ended up donating a box of newer commemorative sheets to a place that uses them to teach kids about history. The moral of that story: never, ever buy anything sold as a collectible. No one lives long enough for those “investments” to pay off.

All collectors have a backstory—whether it’s the good stuff with actual value or they have houses overtaken by plastic recycling, rotten food and human waste. I’m grateful my obsessed collector was the former (sentiment‑driven) and not the latter (insecurity‑driven). If he hadn’t stood watching old license plates, pedal cars, live chickens, and ten‑gallon milk cans spinning upward, Don probably wouldn’t have spent his adult life trying to buy back his childhood toys and the family pieces handed down through generations. His grandfather’s pocket watch, for example, was lost to the tornado but after Don died he had a dozen I had to sell.

He couldn’t pass an estate sale, garage sale, auction or antique store without stopping. And we had fun doing it. We even managed to find most of the toys he’d gotten out of cereal boxes in the ’40s. And I still have his Captain Midnight decoder ring, signal‑mirror ring and bomb rings. Small trinkets, but they come with a large box of memories. ©

 

 

Photos: At the top of the post is one of the showcases in our library for our smalls. The photo here at the bottom is of one wall in our garage for Don's signs. The center picture is of Don showing his friends his gas & oil smaller items. Another wall had 1920s, fully restored gas pumps with the glass globes---can't find a photo of those. But you get the idea. Don was a hoarder but I was an organizer so it all worked out.