Pitching in

This was the quote from my daily inspirational email yesterday: "Penetrate the heart of just one drop of water, and you will be flooded by a hundred oceans." Mahmûd Shabistarî, The Mystic Rose Garden.

It’s certainly true, I thought to myself a touch ruefully, but I’m not sure I’d call it inspirational.

Though I know this wasn’t the intent, I felt that I was indeed being flooded by a hundred oceans for having penetrated one drop of water – if the drop of water was the statement “Yes, I’ll help with that effort” and the hundred oceans were follow-up requests to not only “help with that,” whatever the request may have been for, but to in fact lead the charge.

Last month, a friend was organizing a charity dinner for 100 guests. She emailed me to ask if I would make a dessert. At least that’s what I thought she said. But it turned out I misunderstood by one tiny yet critical word: “a.” Only after I’d enthusiastically agreed to do so – I love baking, and the flourless chocolate torte she had in mind for the menu sounded fun to make – did I reread her request and discover she wasn’t asking me to make “a” dessert; she was asking me to make dessert. As in, all the desserts. As in, flourless chocolate torte for 100.

At first I was amused by my misunderstanding, then a little appalled. Why had I been so quick to say yes, and how could I now explain that I hadn’t really meant I’d take on the responsibility for 100 slices of cake? But then I realized it was time to step to the plate and do my part to help. My friend was coordinating the entire rest of the dinner; surely I could find a way to crank out 13 cakes over the next four weeks.

Then yesterday I received a phone call from my friend Heidi who wanted to know if I’d help put together a memory book for a teacher who is retiring from our kids’ school this June. “I’m not very artistically creative,” I confessed to her, “but sure, I’ll help.”

This morning I got an email from the retirement party coordinator. “Thanks so much for telling Heidi you’d be in charge of the memory book,” it said.

If three times is the charm, I suppose it was inevitable that this would happen once again. Another friend asked if I thought my kids would be willing to help serve food at a church event. I checked with them and confirmed they would indeed be willing, and told her I’d help serve as well. “Great, then I’ll put you in charge of the serving,” she said.

I don’t really think I’m miscommunicating my intentions to all these people. I just think that everyone needs more help with whatever they’ve taken on, and if you don’t say “No!” in your loudest outdoor voice, it’s taken as a “Sure, sign me up to lead the effort.” I’m actually not that effective as a project manager. I’m much better at doing the grunt work than delegating. With the chocolate tortes, my mother offered to split the job with me, and then a few other members of the charity’s leadership committee said they’d make a cake or two as well, but I’m not great at telling people what to do, which might make being in charge of the church meal servers difficult for me; and I’m not good at making scrapbooks at all.

But oh well. I’ve come to realize that sometimes the biggest favor you can do someone who is herself already doing a good deed is just say the magic words “Yes, I’ll do what you need me to do.” There are other people in the school community who are better at making scrapbooks, but they haven’t offered. There are also other adults at church who are better at marshalling child labor, but they haven’t stepped forward.

So perhaps I have indeed pierced the heart of those particular raindrops, in the words of Mahmûd Shabistarî, and been deluged with a small ocean as a result. If there was something I really didn’t think I was capable of, I’d just say no. But this spring, everyone I know seems to be involved in various volunteer efforts, and if they’re going to participate generously, then so will I. We’ll make it work out together. And next time, I’ll be a little more careful to ensure that I’m signing up to make one dessert and not one hundred.

The privilege of helping friends

Monday evening after dinner, I browned some stew meat and onions in the crock pot, added peas, barley, potatoes, red wine, and spices. All night, the aroma of beef stew filled the house. In the morning, I poured the hot mixture into a foil pan and brought it to a friend’s house for the reception she was hosting following her mother’s memorial service.

Later in the morning, I worked on publicity materials for another friend who is about to open a gallery, and then after lunch I drove one of Tim’s friends to his orthodontist appointment because his mother was running late.

Yesterday may have had elements of "Be careful what you wish for," but I have to concede that this is precisely the kind of life I used to dream of having: one filled with friends. When we lived in a much larger town and I was working full-time, I didn’t have local friends. I waved to neighbors as we passed on the street, but no one ever asked me to help them with cooking or driving or publicity, and I never offered. I didn’t know anyone well enough.

Yesterday was a little busier than usual, but for the most part, it was a fairly typical day. A year ago, I was feeling overwhelmed with volunteer commitments and had to admit to myself that the functions I’d offered to fulfill didn’t feel fulfilling at all, so as guilty as it made me feel, I cut back on various institutional volunteering options.

It wasn’t that I was specifically thinking I’d redirect that same energy to personal friends, but that’s how it worked out. Since cutting back on formal volunteer work, I’ve found it so much easier to be generous with my time. I didn’t even realize how concrete a difference it was until I read something I wrote in a journal about a year ago: “Maybe once I give up some of these responsibilities that I’m finding so onerous, I’ll enjoy seeing people again rather than finding it a burden every time someone drops by.”

I’d forgotten how starkly I’d come to resent the very same people I enjoy most, simply because I’d taken on too much.

And although it’s hard to objectively defend the choice to make stew for a friend’s memorial service rather than serve food at a soup kitchen, it seems to be the more enriching choice for me right now. I’m not sure which is ultimately more important: to be a good citizen or a good friend. I can’t say with certainty that I’m doing the right thing by letting myself focus on personal connections instead of the greater good.

But I end the day feeling grateful for the presence of friends and grateful for the opportunities to help them out, knowing they have done and will again do the same for me when the circumstances require it. It’s not necessarily a rational choice. But it’s one that feels instinctively right. And sometimes, that’s the best you have to go on.

A pot of soup, a token gesture

I knew my neighbor wasn’t feeling well. I could tell this because I didn’t see her out tending to her yard or taking care of her livestock. I didn’t even see her driving in and out of the driveway. And the car that belongs to her mother was parked in front of the house all week, meaning that she had come to help with errands and rides for my neighbor’s two children. Eventually, I emailed a note of concern to my neighbor; she responded briefly, saying indeed she had not been well for the past several days.

I tried to offer help, but it can be hard when you don’t know exactly what a family needs. I emailed my friend again and also mentioned to her mother when we saw each other on the road that I could help out with errands, cooking, or rides for the kids. But the family didn’t particularly need anything. They just needed for her to feel better.

On Saturday, feeling a little discouraged that I couldn’t make myself more useful, I distracted myself by turning to a favorite cooking blog, Mangia Vita, to make a pot of soup. I’d spotted the recipe several weeks ago and even gotten as far as buying those ingredients that I didn’t already have on hand, but I wasn’t really sure at the time that I’d ever get around to making the soup. I knew no one else in my family but me would like it, and most of the time, if I’m going to dedicate myself to a cooking project, it had better be something that feeds the whole family and not just myself.

Still, I was curious about this one: a curried lentil and yellow split pea soup with carrots, ginger, coconut milk…and I planned to add some barley I’d long had in the freezer to plump it up a little bit as well. Soon the whole house smelled of curry. I watched it simmer and thicken. I poured myself a bowl. It was delicious. And it looked like it would last a long time, given that no one else wanted to try any.

And then it struck me that of course I hadn’t made this soup for myself at all – I’d made it for my neighbors. They are a family of four, all vegetarians, and they put a high priority on healthy, low-fat cooking with interesting flavors. A vegetarian soup featuring curry, lentils, barley and coconut milk? It sounded interesting to me, but it was much more their kind of dish. My subconscious must have known that all along.

So I let it cool a little, poured it into a large plastic container, put that in a reusable grocery bag, and left the whole thing on their doorstep. I didn’t want to bother them by ringing the doorbell, but I knew whoever next went in or out of the house would find it.

Making soup isn’t much when you feel like there’s a lot more you’d like to be able to do to help, but sometimes all you can come up with is a token gesture. It might nourish them for a meal or two, just as the act of making it and giving it away nourished my spirit in a very small way. I’ll make the next pot for myself, and hope they tell me what else I can do to help.

Giving and taking and asking for help

The email from a friend here in town was brief and succinct. She explained that her husband had been at the bedside of his terminally ill mother for days and my friend had to drive to West Point to pick up her son and bring him home for spring break. They were all worn out from the hospital vigil but wanted to welcome him home with a nice family dinner. Was there any chance I could make something they could all have together when she and her son returned home?

Of course I could, and I did. This is a task that’s easy for me: cooking a family dinner. I made a Mediterranean beef stew with onions and new potatoes, along with a container of marinated cucumber, red pepper and fresh basil salad. Then I brought it over and left it in their fridge.

Asking for help is so hard for most people, including me. This particular friend is one of the smartest and most proactive people I know, and although she’d never asked me for a favor before, it didn’t surprise me that she was able to do this. For me, it would have been harder. When my first child was an infant, I was constantly turning down offers of help, though politely, I hoped – not from friends and family but from strangers who tried to help me carry the stroller through a subway turnstile or pick up a sock that had fallen off the baby. Then one day when I was in the city with my mother and the baby, my mother noticed this tendency and set me straight. “People offer help because they want to,” she said, and that was all it took for me to realize my lack of courtesy in turning down their offer.

The friend who asked if I could make dinner had never asked me for a favor before, but she’d done me a favor – a big one, last year. She and her husband gave me a high-end laptop computer they didn’t need, which effectively transformed my workday, allowing me to write and conduct interviews from anywhere I chose rather than only while sitting at my desktop computer in my home office. I couldn’t help thinking that a pot of stew and a container of salad didn’t exactly match up to a virtually new notebook computer, but then I realized that in a way, to her, it did. She had something I needed and she gave it to me; I had something she needed – the ability to make a family dinner on a day she couldn’t but particularly wanted one – and I did it for her. The monetary value of the items didn’t matter to either of us as much as the fact that we both had something to offer in the name of friendship.

Being able to ask for help is a gift, even more of one than being able to offer it. I was grateful she asked and grateful I could provide. Her generous gift of a computer a year ago astounded me, but to her it was second nature: if you have more than you need, offer it to someone else. It’s a wonderful, admirable way to treat friends, and I’ m lucky for this opportunity to follow her example.

Help desk, know thyself

As I was about to shut down my laptop late Wednesday night, I saw a message on the screen saying that an automatic system update was about to begin. Fine, I thought. Those tend to be advantageous. Let it begin.

Knowing that system changes had happened while I slept was the only explanation I could think of yesterday morning when I couldn’t get past start-up on my computer. It asked for my logon and then said “User profile failed to load.” And there seemed to be no way to get past that screen.

Normally, this kind of major IT problem would send me straight to my husband, pleading for his help while apologizing profusely for taking up his time. But Rick was out of town on a business trip. My brother-in-law, who can solve almost any IT problem, is in Germany. And I didn’t feel comfortable prevailing on my few other personal contacts with IT expertise.

So instead I found the Windows 7 help forum site and started a new thread describing the error message I was getting. Within minutes, someone wrote back to send me a link. The link took me to a very long, multi-step explanation of how to circumvent the problem I was having.

“I can’t possibly do that whole process,” I thought as I read through it. “Start up in Safe mode? Reboot in Administrator mode? Open system files to rename the user profile? I don’t know how to do any of this. I don’t know how to do anything when it comes to the workings of this computer other than turn it on. I’ll keep this link with its long and complex explanation of what to do, and I can show it to Rick once he’s home, and maybe if I’m really lucky he’ll have time to try the fix this weekend.”

Which meant, however, that the problem wouldn’t be solved for several days, and in that time I wouldn’t have use of my computer or any of the files on it.

And I suppose it goes without saying that I spent about six hours the day before editing my own manuscript and hadn’t backed up that file. Six hours of work isn’t a horrible amount to lose – it’s not like six months, which was more like the time frame of writing the manuscript – but as any writer knows, any time you draft something and then lose it, you’re convinced that subsequent drafts are never quite as good as that first one. (By the same token, first drafts themselves are never quite as good as the one you wrote in your head while showering or running.) Even if I redid the six hours of work, I’d always suspect the version that was lost was better.

So I looked again at the long complicated set of directions. “Start in Safe mode?” I read. “I have no idea how to do that.”

Except...wait a second. Something about that sounded vaguely familiar. Every now and then my computer freezes and I push the on switch to reboot. And then…isn’t there usually something on the screen about starting in Safe mode?

I tried it. It worked. I found the Safe mode. I used it. I went on to Step 2, which directed me into the system files. “I don’t know how to work in system files!” I moaned to myself. “That’s way too complicated!”

Except that the wording in that step aligned perfectly with what I saw on my screen in front of me. So I tried it. And that brought me to a screen shot indicating a folder I needed to open. A folder labeled just like the one on my screen.

It turned out the directions weren’t that hard to follow. I went through all twenty steps, and when I was done, my computer was working again.

The triumph I felt was inexpressible. “I’m terrible with computers,” I had told myself earlier. “I’ll never be able to fix this without Rick’s help. If I try, I’ll cause a much bigger problem.”

But then I located the instructions, and followed the instructions, and fixed the problem. Turns out I had the aptitude after all.

I was smug with joy, but it was a sobering reminder not to be so quick to tell myself what I can and can’t do; what kind of person (not the IT kind) I am or am not.

True, being able to follow directions in a help forum doesn’t exactly qualify me for a job at Microsoft’s support center. But it proves that sometimes the first step to solving a problem is believing you can solve it. I believed. I solved. It’s trivial, but I felt so proud of myself: not for fixing a computer bug but for taking the time to see if I could. My reward? The joy of seeing that I had more abilities than I thought, even if those abilities consist primarily of reading directions.

Later in the afternoon I backed up all the files I’d been working on just in case something like this happens again. Well, not in case it happens again. When it does. Because it will. And next time I might not find a fix. But at the very least, I’ll know enough to look for one.

A cow in need is a friend indeed

Staying up all night with a fussy baby is a timeless element of parenting in that nearly all parents go through it, but it’s also usually a phase of limited duration. And although a friend of mine once wrote an essay about how she misses being up at 2 AM in a rocker looking out at the moon, I didn’t believe her. It’s been over six or seven years since I was up at night with a fussy baby, and I still frequently wake in the morning grateful for an uninterrupted night of sleep.

So I wasn’t very happy to wake shortly after midnight last night to hear a bellowing cow. Steady, repeated, high-volume mooing went on for the next three hours. Occasionally there would be a break, and I’d fall asleep, and then it would inevitably start up again. MOO! … MOO! … MOO!

Even with middle-of-the-night drowsiness, it wasn’t hard for me to make an educated guess about what had happened. I can’t actually tell the half-dozen cows on our farm apart by their voices, but Gracie is the only one with a new calf and I did recognize this sound: the bellowing moo of a cow calling to her calf. So I knew that either the baby bull born last weekend was stuck somewhere and couldn’t get free, or had wandered off to someplace Gracie did not want him to be, or something worse had befallen him and he was dead or incapacitated. I certainly hoped the latter wasn’t the case – we do have a lot of coyotes around this summer, but I’ve never heard of a coyote attacking a calf – but the reality is that in the dark of night, there’s just not a lot to do about it. So Rick and I tried to sleep.

When dawn broke, Rick headed out to investigate. I heard a few more bellowing moos and then silence. Wonderful sweet silence. I fell asleep at last and slept until eight.

Rick told the kids and me at breakfast that as soon as he stepped outside, Gracie stopped mooing and walked toward him. Then she started mooing again as if urging him to follow her, which he did. Gracie brought him to the gate separating the two pastures, from where Rick could see that the calf had slipped through the sheep’s gate to spend the night among the bulls.

Rick crossed into the bulls’ pasture, made his way behind the small calf, and coaxed him back through the sheep’s gate. “And then Gracie went like this: ‘Mmmm. Mmmm.’” Rick told us. Not a bellowing moo like before; a murmur of thanks.

Though he tends to be unsentimental about the animals, I could tell Rick was pleased on a number of levels. He’d solved the problem; Gracie’s appreciation was obvious and almost human; and even Gracie’s reaction when he first stepped outside was gratifying: she approached him with apparent relief, as if she knew he could help her. That kind of trust, whether it comes from friends, animals or children, is always a good feeling.

My kids sometimes tease me at how delighted I always am when anyone asks me for directions. Of course, with the advent of GPS, it happens less and less, but since we live on a main road and often walk along it, we do get a fair number of requests for navigational help. And it just feels good to set people on their way. On a different order of magnitude, at church we all sign up to deliver casseroles when someone has had surgery or has lost a family member, and this summer I was part of a large group of women who took turns sending daily greeting cards to a member of our circle who was dealing with an illness.

Helping feels good: it’s that simple. Whether we’re helping a friend, a neighbor, a stranger or a cow, it’s gratifying to meet someone else’s need. Explaining why may be complicated, but sensing the truth of it isn’t. Rick could even see it in Gracie’s big bovine eyes.

Lending a hand

This weekend, the kids and I spent two nights in Portland together. In general, being the only adult and going away with them isn’t my favorite scenario. It’s not that they’re so much work; I just have more fun with Rick or friends along to share the adult responsibilities with me.

But this weekend it worked out well, and one thing I kept noticing was how all three of us were helping each other out. When we’re in the configuration more typical in our family, two children and two adults, the adults tend to help the children; it’s a fairly straightforward equation. This past weekend, with myself, my 11-year-old son and my 7-year-old daughter, it felt more like a symbiotic triangle, as I observed how each of us found ways to help the others.

Saturday, we went for a long walk around town. I had a street map, and Tim helped me read it to figure out the various ways to get to the post office and the playground. He navigated again for me yesterday when we drove twenty minutes to see our friends at the beach, this time from the front seat of the car. We made a few wrong turns based on his misreading of my handwriting, and we would have gotten there a little sooner had we the advantage of state-of-the-art GPS technology, but we didn’t; we had only the directions I’d scribbled down while on the phone with our friends earlier in the day, and we had Tim’s earnest attempts to make sense of them. GPS is great, I found myself thinking, but this kind of teamwork is kind of fun too.

When we needed milk and orange juice, the kids together walked down the street to the market just a block away. Holly carried the grocery bag both ways; Tim handled the change (and, I admit it, the cell phone, since this independence is new to us and I couldn’t help being just a little leery). And when our bikes started to slip off the bike rack on the back of the car, all three of us had to work together to fix the problem: Holly held the duct tape and scissors; Tim supported the bikes; I wrapped lengths of tape around each juncture until the bikes were fastened tight and ready for travel once again.

I was still weary at the end of the day and had the same feeling I do at home of having spent a lot of the day doing things for other people, but when I reflected upon it, I couldn’t deny that it wasn’t a one-way street this time. When Holly realized after we’d left the condo for a walk that she couldn’t possibly go an hour without her blankie, Tim took the door key from me and sprinted back to fetch blankie for Holly. She in turn offered him all the bacon from her breakfast sandwich that she didn’t want.

The biggest thing the kids did for me was agree to bike along next to me so that I could fit in my daily run. They like biking, but might not have chosen this particular course or time of day. Yet they knew it was really important to me to fit in a 45-minute run before breakfast. And they knew I couldn’t leave them alone for that long. So they agreed to go with me. Holly biked a short distance ahead of us; Tim rode next to me and asked questions about every single boat we could spot in the harbor as we passed by – questions of which I knew the answers to exactly none. But I was grateful to the kids for being willing to make my daily run work out for me.

Later in the day, watching them play a modified game of one-on-one in the courtyard outside the condo (because they had a ball but no basket; the game consisted of dribbling and stealing but no shooting), I thought about how much more reliably they get along together when we’re away from home. It’s not that they quarrel at home, more that they generally go their separate ways. The proximity of traveling puts them unavoidably in each other’s company, and they make it work for them, with games like this one, with help here and there, with enjoying each other’s company and making things easier for me when they can too.

Everyone helped everyone. To use my father’s favorite cliché from his years as a camp counselor, we ended the day tired but happy. And I felt a new appreciation for the kids’ attempts to pitch in when needed. It’s one of the great things about traveling: giving them the opportunity to be more than the people they are during normal everyday life. They came through for me in numerous ways, and I really appreciated it.