Most names have been changed.
I spent two hours this morning bagging sweet potatoes, a roughly-estimated three pounds' worth at a time. The big food-bank truck from Boston must have come early, and Alena must have started setup early (or maybe even the day before) - I think I remember wooden pallets already placed. We were out in one of the big canopied parking lots. By the time we started, long tables at the back held coffee, pastries, cookies, a sign-in clipboard, a large container of Germs Be Gone hand sanitizer (yes, that was its actual cartoon-label-worthy brand name), and - just about all-importantly - disposable plastic gloves, clear and almost like sandwich baggies with finger slots. There were also disposable white cotton gloves, an item I'd never seen before: these were to put under the clear gloves if we wanted to, to keep our hands warm. Alena knows how to run a volunteer-powered food distribution.
I did start out with the cotton gloves, but soon discarded them in favor of the clear gloves only. I'd volunteered to be on the team working with sweet potatoes, and a big element of the job was separating and opening plastic grocery bags. That was hard enough without gloves restricting my fingers; the others on the team seemed to reach the same conclusion. The weather was probably in the forties; I was in a winter coat and sneakers, my black work pants and silver flower earrings looking a bit incongruously formal.
By turns I bent, squatted, stood, and even kneeled on a pallet, doing almost nothing but bagging bundle after bundle, with Caspar Babypants songs stuck in my head from this morning's drive to drop Pearl off at preschool. Not that it was silent: there was chitchat with the others, and a lot of listening to theirs among themselves. Annette, from the registrar's office. Carolie, Ashley, and Kaci, from the student-advising team. When we lagged behind at one point, Devin, from the Veterans Center.
Others I recognized, too - Michele, from TRIO, of course. Michael, from the science faculty. Somebody from the testing center, good-humored about her colleagues making jokes about her shortness. Student-services staff of various kinds. And at least one student - a slightly cleft-lipped guy whom I've felt elsewhere to be honestly a bit difficult - a bit prone to too much self-centeredness and too little self-awareness. Today, he didn't draw attention to himself; he took away emptied boxes and flattened them.
The work I did reminded me of other moments - pits crew at Basileia, when I made up verses about each of us to the tune of M*A*S*H's "I Don't Want No More of Army Life," and in the one for myself I made fun of how I kept holding us up from starting every shift, to layer my gloves before handling scorching-hot dishes from out of the drying machine. Appraising sweet potatoes at the supermarket, trying to guess their weight and not necessarily proving very accurate. My first time volunteering at a soup kitchen in high school.
I was really happy. Not just because it was satisfying to feed hungry people, although it was. It was that it was the college being the college, and this was only the beginning of a day full of that. Food packing and distribution in the morning; workshops about assessment practices in the afternoon. Breakfast, lunch, and snacks: decent wrap sandwiches and salads and pastries and cookies; dull and liquidy soup. I was on a student panel in the last part of the day, probably about eighty people in the audience. I knew who most of them were, and they mostly knew or recognized me.
It really is a lot like a small town unto itself. Even with staff turnover, I still recognize so many faces and names. I've stood on so many parts of the campus for so many reasons.
Trying to leave there feels maybe like trying to leave Binghamton did: I know why I'm doing it, and I have some sense of where I might go - but it's been so much a part of me that it's almost unprocessable that it might come to an end sometime soon, that I might go somewhere else.
Or, unlike Binghamton, I might not. It certainly feels possible that I'm called to that place, though how that would square with my family's belonging to a church some fortyish minutes away from it is a question I don't know how to answer. When we talk in church about serving our community, being committed to our community, which one should I mean? They're in two separate states, and to some extent two separate cultures; I can feel the difference.
I am trying to see it as a hidden surprise, the ways everything will work together for good.