Swap shed success

The swap shed at the Carlisle Transfer Station is like its own little box of legends. People who take its "drop-something-off, pick-something-up" credo to heart make claims of astounding finds: showroom-quality furniture, electronics in their original packaging, children’s toys that appear to have never seen the imprint of a child’s finger.

Maybe, but sometimes I think the legends exceed the reality. When I stop in the swap shed to drop off outgrown toys, what I usually see are tattered computer manuals, mismatched Tupperware, and the occasional action figure with a couple of limbs missing.

It’s a nice idea that you can drop things off and someone else might want them. And it’s fun for small children to browse among the discarded toys. But in reality, it’s something of an open secret these days that many of the people sorting through the items on the swap shed shelves are more likely to resell their finds on eBay than to display them on a shelf in their china hutch.

Yesterday, though, I made one of my rare stops at the swap shed as I unloaded trash and recycling at the other stations in the dump. We had recently bought a new vacuum cleaner, and I had been doing battle with my conscience about what to do with the old one. The swap shed isn’t supposed to be a repository for broken stuff that no one could possibly find a use for; that’s what the trash bins are for. But the vacuum cleaner wasn’t broken; it just wasn’t the greatest vacuum cleaner. It might work fine, I tried to convince myself, in a different setting, one with less floor space, fewer rugs, or no shedding dogs in residence.

I was the first person to visit the transfer station yesterday, so the swap shed was empty. Or so it initially appeared. But as I lugged in my vacuum cleaner, I spotted one singular item on the shelf: a glass pedestal cake plate.

“I could use a cake plate,” I thought to myself. I love making desserts, and I like the way pedestaled cake plates look on a buffet table amidst a number of other desserts. It’s even the right time of year to add this to my collection: we host an annual appetizers-and-desserts party in mid-November, followed by Thanksgiving two weeks later, and then a pre-holiday party in early December.

There was something so pleasing about the symmetry as I dropped off my vacuum cleaner – genuinely hoping there was someone who could use it and that I wasn’t just leaving trash – and helped myself to the cake plate. I didn’t need to sort through piles of items to find it. It was the only thing there. I dropped one thing off; I picked one thing up. It was the essence of simplicity.

The swap shed attracts its share of controversy. The idea of neighbors trading treasures from one household to another in a small town has a certain charm that the boxes of dusty National Geographics piled in the shed’s corners sometimes belie. And there are those who resent the reality of the eBay dealers and other forms of resale trade that goes on there, believing it dilutes the altruistic intent of the facility.

I don’t particularly agree with this argument. I think reselling on eBay is as honorable a job as any, and if there are people willing to spend their time going through junk at the transfer station to make a living this way, they’re welcome to do so. But for those of us who have dropped off boxes of dishware or other household items only to have them snatched out of our hands and shoved into someone’s car, sight unseen, to take home and resell, it does sometimes make the overall experience of stopping by the swap shed less appealing.

Yesterday’s experience felt like the swap shed returning to its roots. One item left; one item taken. I’ve already washed the cake stand and put it in my kitchen; this weekend Holly and I are going to make a cheesecake that we can serve from it when guests come for dinner on Sunday. I’m happy I found it and happy I took it home. I just hope someone can make equally good use of my mediocre-but-functional vacuum cleaner.

Doing good, doing well...by writing?

While writing a feature story on a multigenerational project undertaken by a large extended family. I emailed my primary contact in the family to thank him for putting me in touch with his 81-year-old mother.

He responded that his mother had enjoyed the interview with me and ended his email with these simple words: “It makes her feel important.”

Not only the sentiment but his use of the present tense caused a pang deep within me. Not just that she felt important for the 20 or 30 minutes I engaged her on the phone, but that she continues to feel important; that my interest in a project that she and her husband undertook gives her an ongoing feeling of importance.

“Well, she should feel important!” I wanted to reply. “What she did is impressive!”

But as a journalist, I need to be more dispassionate than this. I can’t let myself believe that my primary purpose in writing is to bolster people’s sense of self. I write for the purpose of fulfilling the demands of the paying readership of the Boston Globe, not to make people feel good.

Objectively, I know that’s true. It would be disingenuous of me to claim I write features to affirm for individual subjects the value of their personal endeavors. If that were the case, I should be doing this on a volunteer basis, not as the cornerstone of my yearly income.

Yet I had the same feeling later in the week when a friend’s mother asked me if I might serve as a consultant (my word, not hers) on her imminent attempt to create a lasting work of memoir out of the letters she and her husband exchanged in college. I might indeed agree to take this on, regardless of my (yet unknown) sense of its literary value, because it might give me the opportunity to make a woman who has lived honorably and kindly for eight decades believe that her past matters, and this is a means by which she can pass her heritage of love and morality on to her grandchildren and their descendents.

And as I thought about it, I realized that in some small way, these thoughts were forming a quiet rejoinder to the accusation I often lob against myself that in my chosen career as a journalist – and, put in broader terms, my chosen life’s-work as a writer – I really do nothing to help anyone. I’m not teaching children or nurturing sick patients or feeding the hungry or raising money to protect the environment. I’m just…writing.

But sometimes I catch the briefest glimmer that my chosen work and the arena of altruism might not be as mutually exclusive as I sometimes imagine them to be. True, I get paid for the writing I do, other than the very occasional pro bono project such as a yearly publicity campaign I do for our local prison outreach program. Nonetheless, is it possible that in some small way, I’m wrong in thinking there’s no humanitarian aspect to what I do?

This reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend Tammie earlier this winter after I blogged here about a quotation by Howard Thurman, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

That just doesn’t sound right to me, I confessed in the blog entry. “Am I really allowed to believe that going snowshoeing for two hours is what the world most needs from me?” I wrote.

Tammie, who first introduced me to that quote while we were on a weekend retreat, responded to the blog entry, offering me further food for thought on the topic. She wrote, “Ask yourself these questions:

1) What is important to you? What do you want to do?
2) What does the world need?
3) At the intersection of those two - dive in and go for it. If either of those elements is missing, that's not the place for action or involvement.”

I wanted to think Tammie was right, because I want to think that those things I love to do – a list that would prominently include both snowshoeing and writing – fall into the category of improving the world. And so I read the email about the elderly woman I interviewed again: “It makes her feel important.”

I’m glad. She deserves to feel important and to feel that something she and her husband devoted their time to has the potential to make a lasting impression on thousands of people who will read about it in next Sunday’s Boston Globe. Just as the memoirist I’m going to start working with later this week deserves to know that her words can potentially impact the actions of her grandchildren and future generations.

It’s not an excuse to give up the kinds of volunteer work I find far less rewarding. I need to continue to find ways to help feed the hungry, protect the environment and fight injustice. But it’s a chance to feel that maybe I’m not quite as far off that mark as I had long assumed.