WRITER - Vancouver Lifestyles -
Giving - The Unseasonal Imperative
Maggie waters the plants.
She also chats you up a blue storm. Which, depending on how your I.V. drip is running, can be a blessing.
“When the Push came, all the boys went overseas. So, us girls did everything that the men had done before, you know?”
Maggie is a hospital volunteer. Has been for a donkey’s age. She knows that people, particularly the elderly, are abandoned more often than not by family and friends. Rosie’s got basketball and Ed had to pick up the lumber at the ferry, so maybe tomorrow, right?
When her long day is over, Maggie gets in a few rounds of poker with her buds at the community centre. Then she drives home to a whiskey on the rocks and a last smoke.
Maggie is 92.
Wal-Mart and Sears may tell you otherwise, but it’s not about the I-Pod, plasma TV, new Cherokee, Playstation or single carat diamond insert. Not really. Not at all. It’s true that the Christmas season will make it or break it for many a shop on Robson Street and that Future Shop’s Boxing day sale may in fact constitute 40% of their annual revenues. Or more. All of that is true, and none of it is to be scoffed at. Those purchases determine employment levels for the coming year and the entire closed circle of consumerism leans heavily on our mutual generosity during the Jolly Season. VLM, like any other magazine, depends on ad space sold.
That said, giving is not a seasonal thing. The Maggies of the world are legion. They are out there, by the thousands, giving of their own time and energy day after day in ways small and large that make life more bearable, more endurable, more worthy of thanks. There are many rich and famous who devote their own resources and that of their similarly blessed friends to making the world a better place. VLM has featured many of these good souls over the years and will continue to profile them in coming issues for their timely efforts in support of remedies for the heart, cancer, Aids, homelessness and a thousand and one good causes. The concerts are played, the dinners are served, the speeches are made and money that might otherwise go to more temporal or frivolous uses finds itself working hard to help others.
But let’s spend a moment in this rushed and heated time of year to reflect on those unsung heroes who are, in fact, the best of citizens, the definition of good neighbours. Some institutions come quickly to mind: the Boys and Girls Clubs, the Neighbourhood Houses, the Union Gospel Mission. Here are steadfast organizations (and there are so many more that you can add to this list), which, through fat years and thin, day in and day out, evenings and weekends man the barricades for the powerless and the dispossessed. They care the best they can for women and children, youth in crisis, addicts, ex-cons, the elderly and the indefinable, fall-through-the-cracks human beings who are suffering and know not in which direction to direct their painful cry.
Many of the people who work for non-profits such as these do so at the most modest levels of compensation. Some are paid little more than the people they are hired to help. None of these organizations could function without volunteers. The unions may raise a voice in protest now and then that these “volunteer” positions are robbing paid workers of opportunity, and on rare occasion, their point is reasonably taken. But, on the whole, volunteerism is practically a basic human response. It is certainly, in the Judeo-Christian traditions, something just short of a commandment. Tithing and tsadukkah have been with us for several thousand years. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain asked this of God and set in motion a centuries old argument in which millions have responded, Yes!”
The grandest thing my mother ever taught me was this:
“If I am not for me, who will be?
If for me, alone, what am I?
If not now, when?”
These three little questions (and note that in typical Hebrew fashion, questions are always more central than answers) come from The Ethics of the Fathers and they point the way to how Giving is not meant to be a sometime thing. Giving is daily. In fact, if we can stay tuned, if we can be fully conscious and aware of where we are and who and what surrounds us at any given moment, we might know that giving is the first requirement of the social compact.
There are those among us who are waiting for the revolution. I’ve always believed that the revolution is now, and that it is not about bloodshed and arms or the arrival of another prophet. No, the revolution is one of Gesture. Can we say, “Hello” on the street and mean it? Can we ask, “How are you?” and wait for an answer?
There are some high schools in this community, both public and private, that will not matriculate their young graduates without demonstration of volunteer work accomplished. This is wonderful. Let’s spread this loving virus, make it system-wide.
Maggie is 92. She drinks a whiskey every night and she still smokes. She is passionate and involved and committed to others. Her giving is yearlong. Socks and scarves and CD’s aside, is your giving yearlong? Is mine?
