Friday: I get a call from H. She’d been up all night, between worry and shivering, with a reaction to a strong antibiotic she’d taken for an infection. The drugstore just delivered a better drug, but she needs help. Since I’m all the way downtown when the call comes through, I just dial the number of R., a trusty volunteer who lives two blocks away from H., and give her H’s number. Sure that I can leave the matter with R., I continue with other things on my agenda.
Saturday: I call H. to check that she is feeling better, and sure enough she is. She’d been buzzing around getting things done. She says she is so grateful for R’s calming visit and for the soup and other essentials that R. had brought up to her apartment. Like many of our elders, she isn’t completely comfortable as recipient of services without somehow giving back…although as an elder to be sure she’d given forward many a time in her 86 years. She says, “I hope the day will come when I can volunteer too.”
Sunday Morning: I call 94-year old S., who has long been recovering from a hip replacement operation. For the past six months a couple of our volunteers, Columbia University students, were accompanying S. down to the lobby of her building so that, using her walker, she could take regular physical exercise with encouraging friends. Since the semester had ended a week before, the students had said goodbye for the time being and were off for their summer vacations, leaving S. to her own devices. This, I find out, means that S. is taking no such walks, for she doesn’t feel safe or comfortable walking round the lobby on her own.
Sunday afternoon: I begin looking through the list of our 70 volunteers to see if I can possibly find one or two people who might help S., but most everyone is booked. Baffled, I take a sip of lovely green tea and look out on Broadway from my 3rd floor perch at the myriad of people on their way. One of them might do it…if only they knew. Then, it comes to me. I call H. and tell her that I have an idea: SHE might be able to help S. once or twice a week. When I mention S.’s unusual first name, H. bellows, “Oh, how wonderful! Why, I think I know her. Is it S.S.? I haven’t seen her around for a long while.” I confirm H.’s suspicions. “Of course. Walking with S. in her lobby would do me a world of good too! Count me in! How do I get inducted?” Then, I call S., and when I tell her the name of our newest volunteer who wants to help, S.’s voice rises an octave. “I used to live down the hall from her! Well, Irene,” she says, “you’re simply wonderful!” I have to remind her what was simply wonderful: together, a few hundred neighbors have, with lives interwoven, created a village right here in the middle of a metropolis, and isn’t that something?!
Irene Zola
