Photo Courtesy of Global Reactions
Closing Time
N was a new volunteer at the Food Bank today, her first day was my last day. I had managed to cobble together two part-time positions into a bona-fide, albeit busy, full-time position. I would longer have time for volunteer work.
I wished I had been able to give two weeks’ notice. The last time I had worked with N at my 21-hour a week retail job during graduate school seven years ago, I was freelancing – pursuing my “dream.” I knew that my next adventure with the two part-time jobs wasn’t in the realm of a dream – I wasn’t really sure what it was.
However, we needed the paycheck and I thought combining each would get me closer to where I thought I should land. But I would have the most erratic schedule since the last time I worked with N.
I had already made two trips to the Bay Area scenes calendar by the table where fruits and vegetables were bagged to count how many weeks until a long break from both jobs arrived Thanksgiving week.
Can I remember signing my volunteer emergency contact form that Tuesday in May when I started the Food Bank?, I thought to myself as I counted the days on the calendar. Between that time and today, I would be half-way into October.
Meanwhile, N had introduced herself to another long-time volunteer.
“How is it being retired?” said the long-time volunteer. “Are you like me and look at a blank day and want to cry, like… every day?
“Yes,” N said, “It will be three o’clock and I just won’t know what to do with myself.”
I came to the Food Bank not quite knowing what to do with myself either, emotionally and physically worn after what was supposed to have been a successful transition into corporate communications from teaching and journalism.
There were some Food Bank shifts where I would replay all the drama of my last job through my head. Stacking in blurs, the comforting tediousness of the motion could suddenly transform into a mind haze of questions and replay – Could I have done better? Why wasn’t I tough enough? Wasn’t that a bitchy thing she said to me that day?
As the two volunteers chattered on about methods of keeping oneself busy in retirement, envy crept up my neck. These women were of a generation where school pensions and good health enabled them a new life after 55. N was still young enough to stretch her body like a cat over sheets of fruit cocktail cans, lift a lithe leg up to get extra mileage from her reach, and place a fashionable suede tennis shoe back on the floor without a creak.
I knew I wouldn’t be like them – that most people my age, unless they got very lucky, would have to work with their muscles sore.
Yet working at the Food Bank gave me a glimpse that there was a place for me. I cared about the mission, I was fascinated by the food distribution and the equity, and I was strangely comforted that it wasn’t unlike other workplaces: volunteers snapped when they had bad days and gossiped about each other, delegated jobs they didn’t want to do to others and when clients were waiting they hustled.
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