A Mom Joins Ranks of Volunteers, but She Answers to a Marine

Way back in college, when I had a social conscience and a sense of duty, I volunteered in a program teaching “educationally handicapped” children to read and write.

It wasn’t great shakes as far as saving humanity, but it may have been a step in the right direction, and it did relieve some of the guilt I felt about living with my parents in that house high on top of Trousdale Estates in Beverly Hills.

Fifteen years later, I still have a certain idealism. And I do believe in the need for the mighty to help the weak. In that spirit, and long before President Bush came up with the same idea, I took my “volunteer spirit” and looked for a place where my talents will be used for the common good.

I was drawn to the library of one of my kids’ private schools. Certainly, I’ve had my doubts about the necessity of donating my time and energy to a school that charges the equivalent of a small country’s gross domestic product as tuition every year, then demands that each family participate “voluntarily” in the annual giving campaign.

But even I, with my nonexistent mathematical ability, can see that all the fabulous perks my child enjoys at this school--17 field trips a year, parties in every classroom, a library that stocks every book ever published (except for mine), and tennis courts that put Wimbledon to shame--cannot possibly be paid for by mere tuition.

Those perks are made possible through the hard work and ingenuity of dedicated parents who are at least as busy as I am but who manage to carve out a place in their lives for the good of others.

I sign up to do my part, and soon I get a call from one of the other volunteers telling me we’re going to start twice-monthly meetings.

“Meetings?” I’m aghast. I’m a writer. The only meetings I have are with the Starbucks staff in the morning before I head home to my computer. “What kind of meetings?”

“Mostly breakfast,” she says, obviously missing the point, “7:30 on Monday mornings. Sometimes we’ll have a working lunch.”

A working lunch? Like we’re going to be so busy we can’t find time to eat before or after the meeting?

She must have interpreted my silence for understanding.

“The parent association president has passed along her wishes for the year,” she says, gaining momentum. She sounds like a Marine commander in the field. “She wants six events a year, six of us on the committee, one event per person, three months to plan.”

I feel the floor sinking. This can’t be so hard, I reassure myself. I know books better than I know anything else. I can certainly negotiate my way through a school library stacking kids’ books.

All summer long we meet and plan and devise strategies to make our library more organized, better staffed, more welcoming to the children. To me, the place looks pretty close to perfect as it is, but I’m afraid to voice this to my committee co-chairs because they may think me less of a perfectionist than I should be.

So I stumble into the 7:30 a.m. meetings with my coffee and a chocolate muffin, sit through the working lunches as everyone unpacks salads while I eat a custard eclair. I watch the other moms flip through leather-bound date books in which they have scheduled every hair appointment, every baseball practice, and every one of their thousand-and-three volunteer involvements for the next 12 months.

The other moms are all perfectly made up, full of energy, brimming with ideas. I have no date book, no energy and no hair appointments. My kids don’t play baseball or soccer. And I don’t see why one library needs six co-chairs and as many “events” per year.

Still, we manage to conceive of four library events, plus a used book drive and a new book drive to fulfill the parent association president’s wishes.

“Do we need two separate book drives?” I ask, committing heresy by questioning the president’s authority. “Can’t we have a single drive and put the used and the new books in separate bins when they arrive?”

We’re doing two book drives.

We report to the library, unpack boxes of newly arrived books and file them alphabetically on the shelves. I work Q-T. The Marine commander does L-P. The woman who does U-Z is an anesthesiologist. The person opening the boxes has just finished remodeling her house with plans she drew when she was in architecture school.

One afternoon I look at her and the others, abandon caution to the wind, and venture an opinion.

“You know,” I say, “the school may be better off using each of us in our own fields of expertise and hiring a college student to stack the books.”

The Marine commander looks over at my section and pulls out a T book I’ve misfiled with the S’s. I seem to do this a lot--misfile books, misunderstand orders, mistake a job that takes an entire day when you’re working for free for one that any normal person could easily finish in an hour, if they were to be paid.

“I was a lawyer in a big firm,” says the commander, restacking the errant book, then returning to her section without so much as a pause. “Billed $500 an hour.”

Five-hundred dollars is what I’ve been offered by a women’s volunteer organization in Orange County to spend 36 hours straight with their members, even sleeping in their digs, so I can tell them privately about writing my last novel. Maybe I should take over the L-Ps as well as the Q-Ts, and let the Marine commander go back to practicing law.

“Don’t work there anymore,” she tells me. I’ve noticed she has no use for pronouns. “Quit my job so I’d be available to volunteer at the school any time I was needed.”

She quit her job so she could be a volunteer? At the library?

“Future of our children at stake,” she explains, and the other moms nod in agreement. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, and, therefore, semi-unemployed most of the time. Or maybe it’s because I come from Iran, where most people spend most of their time looking for jobs, but I always thought a job was a pretty good thing.

“Anyone can have a job,” the Marine commander continues. “Not everyone can be a good volunteer.” I think that’s why she has taken my name off the list of library volunteers for next year. She suggests I take the $500-sign-your-life-away offer from Orange County. Or make a hair appointment. Or go back to writing.

Gina Nahai is the author, most recently, of “Sunday’s Silence.”