So yesterday the college had a day of service, in which staff members from two departments were invited to spend the morning volunteering at a community nonprofit. We were gathered together for a continental breakfast, then we broke into groups and drove off in minivans emblazoned with the college seal. We re-convened for lunch, where we compared notes and heard about the various social service initiatives of the college.
I volunteered to go to the nearby skate park. I picked it because I figured that compared to the other options, it would probably be undersubscribed. Everyone falls all over themselves to read to little kids, but teenage skaters need love, too. In the minivan on the way over I turned to my fellow volunteers and said, "Why did you pick the skate park to volunteer at?" All three of them, it turns out, hadn't chosen it. I said put me anywhere, so they sent me here. I was the only one who had chosen it as a place worth helping.
I spent the morning cleaning. The skate park is indoors, in a crumbly old former YMCA gym. It's pretty cool what they've done in there, but it's also pretty filthy, between the plywood ramps and the dirt from the skateboards and the dusty slow disintegration of a century-old building with huge ceilings. We spent two hours brushing and mopping filth, and it felt terribly futile. It will be almost as filthy again tomorrow, and even though we managed to make it a tiny bit cleaner, I knew the teenagers won't notice the difference. And if they noticed, I bet they wouldn't care. It felt depressing.
After we had swept and dry-mopped, we did something interesting. The floor in here is durable but too slick, and with the dust it gets even slicker, the director told us. Kids can't slow down even when they turn their wheels crosswise to their momentum and skid. We need to make the floor stickier.
He emptied four two-liter bottles of cola into the mop bucket, and we proceeded to mop the floor, using cola instead of water or ammonia. When we were done I crossed the huge room to put away my mop. The floor was beginning to dry. The floor sucked at my shoes, with the ticky-tacky sensation of walking in a cheap movie theater, and I felt a tiny surge of accomplishment. I made this small piece of the world a tiny bit better for some skaters, by mopping the floor with cola.
Was it the most satisfying or significant volunteer experience I've ever had? No, it wasn't. But maybe the lesson was, it's not always about me. Or maybe the lesson was, it's hard to clean a skate park. Or maybe the lesson was, cola has a practical purpose after all.