I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(33)

I could be a point of contact, I thought. I could volunteer for something.



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I started small. Before I ventured into school volunteering, I tried neighborhood volunteering.

Green Ladies Garden Club members, mostly women in their late twenties and thirties, were inducted by fellow neighbors. Did I care about gardening? Not really, but this group was right there in my own backyard, and it had monthly meetings. Structure! Organization! Unlike some hoity-toity clubs that demanded proof of pedigree, the only requirement for this one was that you live on one of eleven streets that formed our neighborhood. By joining, I agreed to cohost one informational session about flowers per year. Cohosting duties included booking a speaker, making a casserole and a salad, and opening your home to the fifty or so people who attended. A few times a year, the club held fundraisers to pay for horticultural improvements to the neighborhood. Bake sales, wreath sales, that kind of thing.

I don’t remember if someone asked me to chair the Pumpkin Patch Extravaganza or if I raised my hand and offered. I do remember thinking we could revolutionize the whole thing by selling not just pumpkins on the first Saturday of October, but advertisements on the promotional flyers that went into mailboxes in September. If we got local businesses to pay to have their names on the flyers as sponsors, we could raise even more cash for seasonal flower plantings! I presented the idea by showing off a sample flyer at a meeting in someone’s kitchen one night. If I do say so myself, it was adorable, bedecked with little pumpkin drawings.

The assembled neighbors oohed and aaahed as they passed it back and forth over bowls of chips and salsa. Then one woman held it up with a derisive chuckle. “Cartoon pumpkins?” she said, rolling her eyes. “So this is what you do all day?”

What I DO ALL DAY?

Has there ever been a more loaded phrase? I don’t know what the right answer is to the “What do you do all day?” question. Maybe the right way to spend all day is hand-mashing organic fruit into baby food with a mortar and pestle. Maybe it’s training for a marathon. But apparently it’s not drawing cartoon vegetables.

I knew better than to care. I should have blown it off.

But I was tired.

And I was proud of my pumpkins.

Under my breath, behind a tortilla chip, I growled, “No, I screw your husband all day.”

The woman who asked the question didn’t hear me—thank God—but the friend sitting next to me did, and the tale has entered our book of friendship legends. Once every few years, someone brings it up. I remain extremely horrified (and slightly proud) of myself in that moment.



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I graduated from neighborhood fundraisers to larger community events when I joined the committee for a party to benefit the local hospital.

The way big party committees work is this: You are asked to join at a certain level of financial and time commitment. If the event is to have a “bejeweled” theme (oh, picture the color scheme!), these levels will be named for gemstones: the topaz committee (you pay a certain amount for two tickets to the party, you agree to help lick envelopes, and that’s it); the opal committee (you pay for two tickets and you make a small additional donation, plus you get invited to a pre-party); the ruby committee (write a medium check, help compile the guest list and lick envelopes, and you get the tickets, the pre-party, and your name printed on the back of the invitation); the sapphire committee (big check, more perks, name in a bigger font on the invitation); and the diamond committee (enormous check, a special gift upon arrival, and your name super-big at the top of the invitation ahead of everyone else’s).

It’s the second or third committee from the bottom you want. The opal or the ruby.

Why? Well, ask yourself this question: Do you want to throw a fun bash that raises enough money for a new ambulance, or do you want to throw a fun bash that raises enough for an ambulance and positions you as a good person in the eyes of friends and strangers? You definitely don’t want to sign on at the lowest level (topaz, what a cheapskate) or the highest level (who has that kind of cash?). So it really comes down to how much it matters that your name be printed on the invitation.

I know. You’re not supposed to want anything in return for giving something away.

But I picked the ruby committee.

If all I’d wanted was to give the city a new ambulance, I could have taken the money I spent on a dress and the amount I paid to be a ruby and made a donation. But that wasn’t all I wanted. I admit it, I wanted my name on that invitation. Honestly, I wanted my name anywhere.

My name—all three words of it—no longer appeared on report cards or regular pay stubs. I did most of my freelancing as a ghostwriter, which means that after weeks or months of writing something, I’d see it come out in print under someone else’s byline. My name wasn’t even spoken aloud much anymore. (Think about it: Does a spouse or baby call you by name? No. That only happens in the outside world, the world of professional and social interactions.) I just wanted to see it in print—proof that I was still alive.



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I still volunteer, but in less visible ways, for causes and people and organizations that need help I’m able to give. It feels better to me these days to give time and resources anonymously or near-anonymously. Still, I’d be kidding myself if I didn’t acknowledge that even that kind of volunteering makes me feel like I’m doing something to make the world the tiniest bit better, which makes me a little proud . . . which just brings us back to wrong-ish reasons. Dammit. Here we are again.