Introduction
I have a
difficult relationship with volunteer work.
On the one hand, of course I want to be a helpful person. On the other hand, when I do volunteer my
time to an organization, I don’t always perceive that they make the best use of
me. After all, if they don’t, it’s not
like they’re wasting their money. Maybe
my help was really needed, maybe it wasn’t—it’s all the same to them. (My other altruistic behavior, donating blood, entails no such misgivings, since a unit of blood is worth about $5,000.)
When I wrote
the story below, about cleaning up the playground at my kid’s co-op preschool,
I was a bit bitter because our daughter’s application for the next year had been
turned down. The school was oversubscribed,
with a long wait list, etc., and technically my daughter’s birthday was just
outside their (seemingly arbitrary) cutoff.
That story has a happy ending—the school ended up bending the rules and accepting
my daughter for the next year—but I didn’t know this at the time. So I wrote this tale while in a cranky mood,
which probably improved it. (The tale,
not the mood.)
Cleaning the Preschool Yard – April 23, 2008
Last Saturday we had to
clean up the preschool yard again. I was
feeling incredibly fatigued to start with, unnaturally so. I even passed out for ten minutes in the car
when we got to the preschool, from this crushing fatigue just sopping the life
out of me, and then when I joined my wife in the yard she’d snagged the
push-broom. Dang it! That’s supposed to be my job!
Using that
broom is the only thing I feel qualified to do at that playground: sweeping sand back into the giant ground-level
sandboxes. The yard looks really nice
when the sand is all flush with that spongy ground surface, but I wish they’d install
a lip there to keep the non-sandbox areas from being invaded by great dunes
between clean-ups.
I guess
there’s technically one more job I feel qualified to do, which is extracting
dead leaves from the sandboxes, but I hate that job. The scritch-scritch of the rake is like fingernails
on a chalkboard to me. And it’s a fool’s errand, trying to get the leaves out,
because most of them are these tiny things like the crispy onions that lousy
restaurants put on salads, and there are thousands of them, podlike, floating
continually down from the trees, making me want to not only cut down the trees,
but to fund the design of a sophisticated herbicide that could eradicate that
species of tree from the planet.
So I
wandered over to the water play station, which is this crazy tri-sink apparatus. Surveying it, I was reminded how much I like
this preschool, even though it’s expensive and they rejected my daughter for
next year. Some part of me can’t shake
the thought that they’d have bent the rules for Lindsay if they liked her more. This is irrational, but there it is.
So, yeah, this
playground sink thing is a tribute to the school, having obviously been built
by a very, very smart parent, not just a skilled plumber but somebody who
understands how to educate a child. A
physics professor couldn’t have devised a better way to demonstrate the water
table effect to children. There are all
kinds of valves to open and close, and sprayers, and tubes that feed water, via
gravity, to other sinks, and it’s just a masterpiece except that it’s in this
play yard with all this sand, and the less sophisticated students (probably the
boys, frankly) evidently think there’s nothing more fun to do with this engineering
marvel than to fill it full of sand.
What is it
with boys and sand? When at a
playground, my daughters play sophisticated games of psychological and social
intrigue, their favorite being Incarceration, where they pretend they’re in a
prison and have to orchestrate daring escapes. And what do little boys do? Dump sand all over the slide, in the sinks,
in the playhouse, everywhere, ad infinitum.
I’ve watched this play out at playground after playground. It doesn’t usually bother me, except when it’s
here, because every time I clean this sink, I am removing massive amounts of sand
from it.
This time
was particularly bad, as the plumbing was completely clogged. I decided to drain the standing water from
the sink manually so I could sweep the bulk of the sand out before tackling the
plumbing itself. To make the
sink-draining process less tedious, I tried to teach Lindsay and Alexa about
siphoning. With each unavoidable
mouthful of filthy water I got starting and re-starting the siphon, I consoled
myself that at least I wasn’t siphoning gasoline. The scumbags who steal gas out of our car,
right in front of our house, have that to deal with; once there was a pile of
vomit next to the hose the dude left behind.
Of course, when we’re paying through the nose to live where we do, it’s
not actually all that comforting to think that gas theft is going on in our
community.
Anyway, my
kids were reasonably attentive with the siphon lesson, until they both realized
that instead of listening to me, they could dig an extensive network of canals
and such to make use of the water suddenly at their disposal. I can’t very well tell my kids not to play,
because the only saving grace of this particular work detail is that we don’t
have to get a sitter as long as those two stay out of our hair.
At one point
Alexa killed my siphon by lifting up the end of the hose, and the prospect of
another mouthful of filthy water doubtless influenced my reaction. Here I marveled at my own grumpiness: I should be glad that my kid is even halfway
listening, whether or not she absorbs the lesson, because most kids would be
ignoring me completely, flipping me off and/or dumping more sand in my tri-sink
apparatus. Which was proving to be my
Waterloo.
I scraped
most of the sand out of there, to the detriment of my already wind- and
ice-water-chapped hands (girlie-hands that should take real work in stride but have been softened by office work) and then set about trying to unclog the
sinks. Between flossing the pipes with a
hose and trying to build up enough pressure to blast out the sand, I got
confused and turned on the wrong valve and got a full sprinkler going, right in
my face, soaking half of my dry-clean-only sweater. Did I mention that there was a cold wind
howling through there? I thought this
was spring! I thought this was
California!
Anyway, I
eventually got the drains basically working, and Lindsay and Alexa complained
bitterly when their water supply was finally cut off for good. It was sort of hard to tell what Erin had
been working on this whole time. The
place looked better, sure—the sand was smoother, there was a bit less of it on
the non-sandbox surfaces—but it seemed like I’d been fighting with the sinks
for ages; surely by now everything else should look good as new? I’d hoped so, because my contribution would
be practically invisible, and one little boy in five minutes would probably re-clog
the whole sink station before any adult laid eyes on it. But there was no metamorphosis in the yard,
and—worse yet—Erin still had control of the coveted push broom.
Oh how I
envied her that push broom. I think the
best thing about the push broom is that you can just stand around leaning on
it, feeling like a government-employed janitor killing time until his shift is
up. Whenever I do schoolyard cleanup I
fantasize about living in a socialist country, taking comfort in the idea that
when that whistle blows, I’m done, whether or not I accomplished anything
during my time there.
Our actual
situation is quite different: we don’t
get to leave until Erin is satisfied that we’ve done a kickass job of cleaning,
one that will bring glory to the Albert family within this preschool community—never
mind that they’ve already rejected our daughter and by extension our whole
family, so it’s too late anyway. And
never mind that most of the other volunteers probably show up, set a
tipped-over pail upright, bury a few dog feces, and bail after five or ten
minutes. I looked around and made the
mistake of being obviously between tasks, and Erin asked, “Are you ready for
our special job?”
Man, I
thought this whole thing was
special. You mean we have some extra
tacked-on thing to do this time? Yes, we
do. We have to organize the tool shed: she’d signed us up for this. Now, if there’s one thing I’m really
uncomfortable with (actually, there are actually a great many things I’m
uncomfortable with), it’s organizing some area that isn’t mine. If somebody went and organized the tools in my
garage, I’d be really annoyed.
Actually,
that’s untrue. I’d be really pleased if
somebody organized my garage, but only because there is no organization there—I’ve got house tools (coarse, ugly,
practically unusable) and household gewgaws (incomprehensible, crummy, made in
China) all mixed up with bike tools (beautiful, perfect) and bike parts
(precise, precious, expensive). But this
isn’t my garage we’re talking about.
It’s an established preschool, and if there’s one thing worse than
performing manual slave labor to incrementally beautify this doomed
child-ridden environment, it’s putting out similar effort to actually lower the quality of the adult-focused
subset of that environment. Somebody who
actually cared about the tool shed probably spent a fair amount of time and
energy figuring out how to organize it, and it’s pretty well organized. What could I do to show that I’d put in my
time, besides changing things around arbitrarily?
So I hauled
everything out of there, swept, and hauled it back in. This took a great deal of time. Most of what I was hauling out were
tricycles: really awesome, heavy,
bulletproof tricycles, the coolest I’ve ever seen. At least a dozen of them. Glorious, surely European-made, some with
trailers, some with cargo bays, most of them swept back like choppers, with the
sleek yet burly industrial look of WWII-era aircraft or Kitchen-Aid
mixers. Where did these things come
from? The newer tricycles among them—also
Euro, also cool—were already wearing out.
The older ones suggested an earlier time, a golden era, when the
preschool was either totally flush with cash, or had a kid whose dad was either
a tycoon or just very, very fond of exquisite trikes and children.
I suppose
handling this fleet of sweet trikes could have been pleasurable to me, but the
sad fact is, my appreciation was lessened by the thought that Lindsay doesn’t
even ride the trikes, because she’s not strong enough to pedal them. (I’m not surmising this—she’s told me
so.) Alexa tried to ride one while we
were there, but the effort of running over a hose or a tree-root-lifted
concrete lump was enough to ruin both her forward movement and her resolve.
So anyway, I
got everything out, sorted some rubber balls (a grown man, sorting balls!),
flung some things back behind other things to create the impression of
tidiness, swept a bunch of sand out of there, and then brought everything back
in, and half the sand with it. Meanwhile,
another family had shown up to clean the inside of the school, and their kids
ran through the puddles, joined by Lindsay and Alexa. Those two completely forgot their very clear
instructions, and tracked sand all over the play structures until they looked
exactly like they did when we arrived. I
kept a close eye on the tri-sink area, ready to intervene should anyone go near
it with so much as a pinch of sand.
Another gust of wind came in and broke loose a mind-boggling flurry of
leaves, which settled down over the sand
like a blast of confetti in an operating room. (Don’t over-think that metaphor.)
To my
amazement, at this moment Erin declared we were done. And for what?
By the time we found Lindsay’s and Alexa’s shoes, put our equipment
away, and hauled ourselves out of there, the place looked like a war zone. Two and a half hours, and the teachers will
probably think we never showed.
Sweet.
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