It’s a banner year in the M. and Dee household. We’re ending it with both a bang and a whimper. Today was quite possibly the whimper. I’m expecting bigger things from our soon to be trip to Asia.

Because Malaysia is beckoning, it’s been a couple of years and M. could get a block of time off of toil, there was no New England Christmas. No snow (yay!), none of my family, no tree. Having just got a visit from two out of four siblings, I was more than ready to take a pass on heading into Boston and the cold and the hectic holiday travel. (It also helped I got to see some good friends during the year, wish I had seen more.)

What to do, then, if it’s Christmas in California and you’re saving dough to blow in Thailand? We decided to volunteer. Those less fortunate, holiday giving, counting our blessings, blah fuck blah, you dig?

M. found what seemed like the perfect thing, particularly where we both feel lucky with big, extended families that (as much as I might particularly bitch) we have each other and others always. It’s an organization that arranges visits to the elderly all year long but has special holiday events with meals and presents hand-delivered to folks who don’t get out and might be alone. We signed up and made our plans.

This morning rose and we got ready, virtually patting ourselves on the back at our own good fortune and generosity. You know, the way one does in the do-gooder vein. We drove into a temple in San Francisco, joined an orientation with coffee, snacks and other fresh-faced, smiling volunteers. We learned about the history of the organization and their choice of “flowers before bread,” celebrating and visiting and making friends not just providing aid. All good, all happy joy. I’m all for that spirit and not setting up the recipient as a charity case.

Nonetheless, my own insecurities made me a little bit nervous. What if the visit was uncomfortable, or we weren’t the sort that would float the conversational vote for our visitee? I kept thinking about how many people you meet in a day or week or month or year with whom you don’t actually click. Some poor shut in gets the ring at the doorbell and on the other side of the door is a well-wishing, do-gooder with fascinating stories about shoe laces or Cat Fancy Magazine.

I imagined myself in the future, when some boring schlub came to “help” me by boring the everliving shit out of me. Really though, I hoped that someone might find M. and me as amusing as we do.

We picked up a card with a name, gender, race, age (which all the older women I’ve ever met probably wouldn’t have appreciated as their statistical description), a map to her house, a wrapped gift labeled “pillow,” a turkey meal with sides and pie and a single rose. We headed out in the general direction.

Thanks to urban parking it actually took us a while to get to our new “friend’s” neighborhood. We eventually parked the car and started up the street. We were told it would be her first visit, and both of us, eager to not fuck it up, decided to call ahead and let her know we were almost there. I actually hate talking on the phone, and I hate calling strangers even more (never mind I earn my keep mostly on the phone), and I’m a total weasel, so I dialed and handed the phone off to M.

I could tell by the flash from smile to serious that the telephone conversation had taken an unexpected turn. After introducing himself as a volunteer for the organization, he got blasted. It seems that on Thanksgiving this woman had been stood up after waiting all day for a visit. When Christmas rolled around, the organization called and she told them, she said in no uncertain terms, to remove her from their lists and to leave her alone.

Someone clearly didn’t get the memo, and we were dispatched. She ended the call with M. telling him that she didn’t know us and didn’t want us in her house. Fair enough, I say.

We schlepped back to the temple with our gift bag and meal failure marking our resolute postures. Three guys were packing up shop, The leader, judging by his cranky, jaded demeanor, took back the small, wrapped pillow gift, but he told us to keep the meal and find someone who could use it. In fact, he led us through the temple’s kitchen back to a walk in refrigerator with a stack of leftover meal trays. He encouraged us to take a few and hand them out or bring them to another organization that feeds people. We did.

A few minutes later we were driving into San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. The ‘loin, replete with an air of human urine and the hope of any kind of drug you need, is SF’s Skid Row. Homeless and seedy own the streets. Within an easy 10-minute stroll down the street, we had no trouble finding takers. A shopping cart dude eyed the inside of our bag hungrily, and happily we gave him a full meal, a piece of pie and a festive cheese plate.

The next dude was just a guy on the sidewalk chatting with another guy. But, after we passed them he called out something like “I’ll trade you a drink for a donut.” We turned around and surprised him with more than a donut, but a full meal and a bottle of apple juice. We didn’t take any drink from him, but cheerily in the holiday spirt he wistfully let us know that he had spent the morning doling out the blunts, and he wished he had saved one to give to us. Christmas cheer abides.

We then dropped the last two meals on a cluster of three. M. presented the rose to a woman in the cluster who looked like maybe she hadn’t been handed a long stem in quite some time, if ever.

In the end, it wasn’t what we planned. It was a totally wonderful and awesome object lesson in charity, though.

It’s easy to think of yourself heading out and helping. I’m sure the volunteers and the organization feel good about the good they do in the community, and they should. At the same time, someone failed to pass along the message of what the woman we were meant to visit actually would have liked, i.e. nothing.

So much of the day reminded me of my mother, dear old Pat. To her, “charity” was a dirty word; it strips people of their dignity, forces them to rely on others, reinforces a harsh and negative hierarchy of status. Helping people for her had to come from a place of just helping out collegially. Or, she might find a simple way to flip the status of who was helping whom. Winter coats that my then young nephews didn’t like were passed along to a couple of boys in Pat’s class without proper winter coats. She explained that they were doing her a favor helping her to get rid of them. I think through her I learned that sometimes the story, the pitch, the dialog is everything in the telling.

Perhaps, I actually respect the work I’m paid to do, because it’s non-profit work in the same spirt of Pat’s philosophy, which also had a strong dose of helping folks helping themselves. Charity is easy, it helps feed the ego of the doer. But, change, helping out, being part of community, giving the other guy a chance, letting someone in line ahead of you, sharing what you have, that’s harder.

Moreover, If Pat had ever found herself on the receiving end of a kindly visitor, no doubt in my mind but the visitor would find themselves cold on the front porch on the closed end of a double-bolted door. She would have given that hypothetical do-gooder the same speech that M. had gotten and with the same conclusion of being left alone.

We were 3,000 miles away from my usual family holiday, and we were doing something neither of us had ever done. But, we were together, and I think a little bit of Pat’s spirit was haunting this holiday.

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