We Must Learn More Than How To Take

My daughter laughed at me the first time I brought it up. When I brought it up a second time, she announced that her friends thought this really weird. The third time I had to mention it, I gave her a deadline.

She’s just barely old enough to have a paying job but doesn’t have one this summer. So I required a volunteer post. She has one now, although she still thinks me strange.

We’ve discussed it, this idea that everyone who can should give back to the community. I’m afraid she comes from a generation that has watched most everyone just take and expect to take more.

I come from a generation whose parents and grandparents and older brothers and sisters gave, sometimes their time or their money or their skills, sometimes their lives.

So when my parents required that I find volunteer work when I entered my teens, it wasn’t much of a surprise. I was a military brat, and the concept of service was in the very air I breathed.

I checked out and filed books in the air base library. I typed and filed in a Red Cross office. And I served as a candy striper at Tripler Army Hospital in Hawaii. Candy stripers got their names from their uniforms, seersucker pinafores over white blouses.

Adults would immediately say, when they saw me ferrying a child down a cold hospital hall: “What are you doing here? You should be at the beach.”

Much as I love the beach, I was right where I should have been. I was assigned to a pediatrics ward. This was in the days when parents were given visiting hours; they weren’t allowed to stay with their children. And this was in the days when wards were more common than private rooms, particularly in a military hospital. So there were a lot of not just sick, but desperately lonely children in the pediatrics ward.

That summer I learned more about how life works than I had ever glimpsed in my own home, school or the many books I read. One week I played with a tall, lanky girl of 7 whose parents had brought her to be potty trained. She could sit, but couldn’t walk. She couldn’t talk. It was very hot, and I would fold paper into fans for her, and show her over and over again how to move her wrist to fan herself. She would eventually catch on, enjoy the fanning, then inevitably drop the fan. Once it was dropped, it was unrecognizable. And so we would start again.

The nurses wouldn’t tell me much. I knew children’s names. Sometimes I knew what was wrong. I was never told a child was dying, even when that was obvious.

Two children were dying that summer. One was a beautiful toddler with blond hair, blue eyes and the dimples of a cherub. She had a brain tumor, and her parents would come and weep by her bed. She was their only child, their firstborn and had come to them late in their lives.

The other was a boy of around 10, although he looked much younger because he was so thin and frail. He had leukemia and was in pain much of the time, his body rail-thin and blooming with bruises. He was often mean in what he would say and do, and at first it was hard for me to understand his temper had nothing to do with me.

He became quite a different person in his last few days, very gentle with others, very kind. I realized with a heart-stopping shock one day, as I helped him in and out of a wheelchair in a bathroom, that he knew he was dying and looked forward to death, that he had entered some peaceful accommodation inaccessible to me.

One child lived at the hospital. His name was Ricky. Ricky was, in the harsher language of those times, a “vegetable.” The nurses were proud of him because he had survived so long in their care. I was told he was “the world’s longest living vegetable.” I think back on that phrase now and marvel at how our language has reshaped itself around our greater understanding, our sensitivities and our fears.

The nurses loved Ricky. They insisted that his eyes flickered because he recognized them, that he knew them by their tender ministrations and appreciated them. That belief served them and Ricky well.

This was the world I lived in for one summer, and while it might sound like a horrible place, I remember with gratitude that big room with its many long windows and its expanse of bare, always-waxed floors and its sad and suffering children. I think it might have been the place where I grew up, and grew up in a way that would not have been possible elsewhere.

There will always be great need. I hope there will always be people willing to meet it, to roll up their sleeves and deliver. I hope we’re bringing up children who understand how very important that is, not only to others but to themselves. You don’t grow a soul when all you do is take.