So, what would you do if your cute man, the fixer of household brokenness, the chef de cuisine , the guy who cheerfully accompanies you to Maryland Sheep and wool (next weekend! yippee!), the fellow with the big booming laugh you just adore – yeah, that guy – what would you say if he asked you, "So, want to spend three hours on a Saturday stuffing bags for a library conference?"
If you’re me, you say, "Sure."
And you don’t just say yes because you know it scores points with the guy who already asked you to marry him, the one who loves the cats as much as you do despite the fact that they mean he has to take prescription meds just to breathe properly, the one who has never once yet said, "Do you really need more yarn?" Well, not just because of those things. You do it because you love tasks that can be finished. You love to be a cog in that "getting stuff done" machine that tends to whip up around big, intellectually undemanding, multi-volunteer projects. As far as I’m concerned, these kinds of things are fun. And in a world where too many tasks are constant, never-ending palavers with too many people having weird turf wars, it’s very cool just to show up and look around, see something that needs doing and just do it.
Yes, I may well be clinically insane. And yes, once in a while there is a really annoying person who whines or moans or gets bossy and tries to manage everyone else or who decides to monopolize the worst job in the place the better to reach their inevitable martyrhood that much sooner (and more vocally). But in this particular instance, there was nobody who did any of those things. There was just a big hotel conference room with long tables and a sort of endlessly evolving assembly line of stuff going into conference bags and people figuring out different ways of getting everything that needed to get into the bag into the bag with as much cheerful efficiency as possible.
The conversations were funny and fractured – I learned little snippets and bits about the people who were working my assembly line (I ended up assembling little packages of advertising cards that put me at a mostly static point, while other volunteers shuttled up and down the rows of tables). I learned that Len from New York is also an only child, has worked in three Catholic institutions, thinks that his work history is funny because he’s Jewish, and was a chemistry major in college. I learned that Corey has an autistic child, lives in Michigan, used to travel a lot, and has an outrageous sense of humor and a larger-than-life personality. The rhythmic to-ing and fro-ing, together with the short bursts of conversation, reminded me strongly of the way conversations during country dances are constructed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OeSKfEY3NEAnd best of all? I got to go home with the cute house-fixer, cat-lover, chef de cuisine and have steak for dinner and watch Battlestar Galactica . I win.
