Vic Socotra

17 August 2008

Volunteer Labor

Constantina Tomescu

I watched a marathon in real time last night. The women were grinding it out in Beijing, starting off slow in the humid air, but inexorable in pace. The leader at the half-way point took off, and there was drama in each footfall past the TEmple of Heaven and the Forbidden C ity.

I have no idea why the network decided to contrast the immediate gratification sports with the one that takes everything out of a human being. I’m glad they did. These women did something that I have done, albeit much better. It is quite different than the divers and swimmers and gymnasts who are from another planet.

Michael Phelps actually accomplished the unimaginable last night, winning eight gold medals. One of them was by a margin of a thousandth of a second, something so small as to be indistingui shable by mortal people.

The marathon is different, and that is why I watched every second of it. Running one takes an ability that is common enough for all of us to share, except for the intensity. All it takes the ability to put one foot in front of the other for twenty-six miles, plus the longest one thousand and fifty-six feet you can imagine.

It is an odd distance, derived from the distance that the professional runner Pheidippides had to cover in 490 BC to tell the Athenians that the Persians had bee n defeated on the plains of Marathon. That was the good news, but the bad news was that more of the invaders were coming by sea.

He ran the distance without stopping. It was over a hundred degrees on parts of the trail, and after passing along the warning, he died.

That is not uncommon with temperature. On my last marathon in sultry Washington, I passed a dead runner on the 14th Street Bridge. He looked fit enough there on his back, though his eyes were as wide as fried eggs looking up at the sky. Th ere were emergency personnel on scene, volunteers, and so I kept moving. He had been much faster than I was up to that point.

No one died in Beijing. The winner turned out to be a thirty-eight-year-old blonde from Romania named Constantina Tomescu. She is a very attractive and determined woman, and she won by putting one foot in front of the other for miles consistently run at a shade less than a six minute pace.

The greatest athletic accomplishment of my life was to complete a marathon at a shade less than20nine minutes per mile. If my best performance were laid down next to Contstantina’s, I would have entered the Bird’s Nest almost ninety minutes after she crossed the line, showered, received her medal and gone to the airport.

All the volunteers lining the course would have been gone, too. I applaud the volunteers, who make so much that is good and worthwhile in this world possible.

They say that in volunteer groups, the quality of the work can be erratic. You get what you pay for, is what I say,20and having spend the morning in a quarterly Board meeting in the group that shamed me into actually doing something, you can imagine that I am eager to get through the morning editing the newsletter.

I became a Cub Master to a pack of otherwise innocent boys one time because my insistent neighbor would not let me down out of the tree I was trimming until I said I would volunteer. The short-term inconvenience of being stuck in the branches seemed to outweigh the longer-term commitment.

Plus, you really do feel20that you owe something to all the people who give so much to make life a little better. At least I do when I am stuck up a tree.

There are a gazillion volunteer organizations out there in this great land. I won’t even hazard a guess at the number; last I heard there were over 50,000 police and fire departments in the United States, and that would logically imply a historical society for each, along with a Great Books, Boy and Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls, Red Cross, Little Leagues for all the sports and more that I cannot begin to imagine.

Oddfellows, Lions and Rotarians. I won’t even touch the myriad of religious affiliations.

I got a sample of them at the Arlington County Fair last week, a sea of card tables and earnest volunteers for the Sister Cities Programs, volunteers for the Gay Liberation and two people with sober expressions whose banner indicated that sexual orientation could indeed be changed.

I moved rapidly past them. But this dizzying demonstration of civic activism also touches on pocketbooks . Most groups are small beans, though that does not mean that the beans are not quite real.

I stopped to chat with the Ladies who were manning the Arlington Historical Society, and earnestly told them that I had renewed my membership out of pure unadulterated guilt. I mean, I mine the past for all sorts of stuff, and ought to pay someone for the rights to old scandals and peccadilloes.

Without the Society, who will remember the fight over the Buckingham Village Pool, the one that once stood where Glebe Road and Pershing Street once met? That the answer to black and white residents swimming together and the Klan and the American Nazis showing up in Our Fair City to protest in their robes and swastikas is as much the story of our times.

I doubt that the Historical Society has much in the way of resources, ready cash, that is, but they occupy an old elementary school over on Ridge Road. If you think about it, the adjoining properties are all worth more than a million bucks. It is not a liquid asset, of course, though people remember a lot of organizations in bequests and stocks left behind when the membership moves on the Big Association in the Sky.

Don’t even think about groups like the Masons, who have vast structures in every major down-town in America, and second-floor meeting halls in every burgh in between.

It is a good thing that we have volunteers to manage it all, keep the books and mind the tax-forms that have to be filled out. No one has enough money to pay a professional to do all that stuff. It is volunteer work of the most valuable kind, and you get what you pay for.

Which is how we sort of angle into this particular story. Let’s call it a fable, since this obviously could not happen in real life. There are those people who stand up to donate their time, and go to the meetings, and fill the offices of the organizations. There are others who will, out of shame at not doing something, at least open their wallets or write a check.

Imagine that you are a woman of a certain age. Literate and smart, with a lively sense of humor, tempered by an incredible drive. Imagine that you have tried all your life to do the right thing, teach your children to do the right thing too.

Retirement is not the correct term for what you are doing. You have relocated to a little community with a fascinating past, and a few historic bits of property and the contents of most of the attics in town. The Society needs help, and as you have, all your life, you do the right thing and volunteer.

In time- not much time, were the truth told- the Board recognizes your capabilities, and ability to absorb additional tasks without complaint. Imagine yourself elected President of the Society by acclamation in the meeting room of the old train station the Society owns, and suddenly in possession of a great ring of jangling disassociated keys, effused with the momentary pride and sudden realization that you have done it again, and all these nice people are counting on you for newsletters and planning, and20you even have an employee on staff, who is getting a check for doing less than what you are doing for free.

You can make a difference, you know you can, and without complaint you buckle down and do what you have done all your life. You get to work, and bring order from chaos. Effective management is not a sprint. It is a marathon.

It is years later that you begin to realize that there is something wrong.

As they say, you get what you pay for in volunteer work, and sometimes, you get even more than that.

I’ll tell you a little more about that tomorrow. I have some volunteer work to get out of the way this morning if I am going to get any quality pool time in at all today. I can't run any more, so I have to swim while I can. Summer is a’wastin,’ you know?

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