Section 11: Volunteerism
My first volunteer experience was one that my Mom signed me up for, whether I liked it or not. She was a registered nurse, and one of her jobs was at the Red Cross Blood Bank in San Jose. One summer (probably when I was in high school) she decided that I (and possibly my brother) needed to assist there. My initial job was easy: putting together a blood collection kit for later use. This consisted of attaching some pre-printed labels onto test tubes, threading the test tubes through slots on the (empty) plastic blood collection bag, unfolding a the piece of cardboard that acted as a tray, and putting the bag on the tray – an easy job that a third grader could have performed. But after doing a bunch of those, they moved me to a different job: I had to load up a cart with the filled bags of blood, and take them to a freezer for storage. And that was a problem – just handling the bags of blood was too much for me, and I got very faint and felt awful. So they had me lay down on one of the beds used for recovering donors. I was such a wimp – those folks had given blood, while I was merely transporting it. My Mom had drilled into me the importance of giving blood though, so once when I was a young adult I attempted to do so. But after they got the bag less than half full I began to feel terrible, and they had to halt the donation – I suspect they ditched the blood because it wasn’t a full pint (or whatever the standard amount was), so I went through that misery for nothing. So much for that version of “giving”.
And although it wasn’t really volunteering or community service, when I used to bicycle through the hills around Los Gatos, I’d sometimes pick up any aluminum cans I might come across … which turned out to be a portend for some of my later activities.
My second volunteer experience was cleaning up the oil spill in Marin, detailed in section 3. My third experience was in the late 1970s. The Berkeley Scottish Country Dance class I attended was held at All Souls’ Church, and one day I noticed a poster on a bulletin board there announcing the formation of the West Contra County Hotline and asking for volunteers. For some reason this appealed to me, so I signed up. The training consisted of perhaps a half dozen sessions at a church in the city of Richmond. The main point that they taught us was that we were there to listen: not to pass judgments, nor offer advice – just to listen … which turns out to be a pretty tough thing to do. It was not a suicide hotline, but instead an opportunity for people to talk when they were feeling down. It was a little operation, and the hotline was only open on Friday and Saturday nights, something like 7-11pm, under the assumption that those were the times that were hardest on lonely people. We didn’t get a lot of calls – sometimes during a shift I’d get one or no calls at all, which didn’t please the minister in charge of the program, but frankly I was happy to get away with not having to deal with the unhappiness I was hearing. I don’t know how long the hotline lasted – but I was there for only a couple of months. But the concept that it could be helpful to just listen to a person’s woes made a big impact on me.
Soon thereafter I returned to Richmond for another reason. In December of 1980, my former roommate Roy Kaitner cued me in to a Black family living in Tara Hills (a neighborhood of Richmond) that was being harassed by a KKK group: he was shocked that this could happen here in northern California, and in this day and age. The local police were accused of not doing a sufficient job in watching out for them, so a volunteer group (East Bay Organizing Committee) arranged for people to keep watch over the house. Roy and I pulled perhaps a half dozen shifts: we’d park our car a few doors away from the house, and note if anything untoward was happening, and log how often the police came by – we had absolutely no contact with the family ourselves. We volunteered for the late night shift (3am to 7am), but never witnessed any wrongdoing. So it was pretty boring, but we managed to pass the time playing “Ace of Aces”, a two player combat picture game about World War I fighter dogfights. I think we sat watch once a week for perhaps a month at most. And just to round things out about Roy, he later joined a monastery of an Eastern Catholic Church in Redwood Valley up in Mendocino County, and in 1985 I attended the ceremony wherein he took his final vows as Brother Seraphim there (Fig. 7.11.1).
After that, there was a long drought in my giving anything back to the community. However, once my retirement kicked in, I began to get going again. John Prine’s song Hello in There is a beautiful, haunting song about aging. And it inspired me to sign up for a service that offered door-to-door transportation for seniors who were unable to drive themselves, mostly for chores like grocery shopping. However, I ended driving only one person before COVID-19 came in and shut everything down, so that effort was basically over before it started. But I have volunteered other outfits. One is the California Academy of Sciences, where I pretty much do the same thing while employed there … except now I only go in one day/week and make my own hours (including taking a lunch break that extends longer than 15 minutes). I have also volunteered for three groups that basically involve litter cleanup, and two other programs that are devoted to park maintenance, and have also served as an election judge (technically, I guess the latter is not volunteering since judges do receive a stipend, but it isn’t much).
My other effort is on behalf of the American Red Cross. Based on my previous failed attempt to donate blood I certainly wasn’t going to try that again, but the ARC benefits from a variety of volunteer efforts, and I opted to help them out by being a driver. This basically entails driving a van to transport blood between ARC locations where the blood is donated or processed, and the hospitals where it is used1. ARC provides the vehicles and pays for the gas – I just drive ‘em. Struck by the rhyme of “drive” with “die”, after consulting with my SCD friend Patty Rosenmeyer (a classics scholar) I came up with a (hopefully) inspiring sign that I posted at our ARC facility: “Vecturi vos salutant”, which translates into “Those who are about to drive salute you” … a paraphrase of a quote from Suetonius (“Those who are about to die salute you”) reportedly used by the gladiators acknowledging the Emperor Claudius in AD 52. And although I am not one of the front rank people who donate blood, I comfort myself in that now I’m at least continuing the legacy that my Mom was engaged in 60 years before.
1 One unexpected fringe benefit of working for the ARC came in late 2019 when the COVID-19 vaccines first became available. I was now part of the vital chain of health services, and thus qualified for a vaccination long before most other people.