Day 73 – April 21, 2010
We did not mulch trees today. We did, however, supervise high school boys as they mulched trees. It was fantastic.
Our morning began at the forestry department tool containers in Druid Hill Park (the park we drive through every day to work), where we loaded up lots of shovels, rakes, and wheelbarrows into the bed of a Tree Baltimore truck. We distributed the tools evenly to 14 mulch piles around the park, all along the central road. We also distributed ourselves evenly (seven remained after accounting for Melissa taking three to the doctor) to the mulch piles. I got mulch site two, which stretched from the road up a gentle rise to a gazebo. It was excellent.
Unlike our deer fence post-hole day at Cylburn Arboretum, we had an adequate number of tools and supplies (buckets for carrying mulch supplemented one wheelbarrow per pile) for the number of volunteers. I got 35 boys at mulch site two along with two teacher chaperones. All our volunteers were high school seniors from a local Catholic school participating in their annual service day. They were tons of fun, your typical senior boys.
They got through the two piles of mulch in roughly twenty-five minutes, but we fortunately had a third pile delivered and set some to raking leaves to occupy a bit more time. They finished the third pile around 11:50, well before the anticipated 1 PM lunchtime, but ended up being able to clean up early and enjoy their cookout lunch at the gazebo. This was good, because Ann and Charlie from Tree Baltimore already seemed to be grasping for additional tasks for them to do at 11 AM just before they coordinated the second mulch delivery.
Fun story of the day: I was talking to a couple of my, uh, less motivated volunteers as they ‘supervised’ mulching at one tree. One was fixing a wheelbarrow by replacing the missing metal axle piece with a stick (worked out perfectly) while the others stood in a circle near the tree and occasionally spent about five seconds spreading around a new bucketful of mulch as it was delivered. The guys enjoyed asking me questions, such as where I went to college (they were all impressed) and what AmeriCorps NCCC is. One asked if I’d played a sport in college and I said yes, I’d played rugby. Upon hearing this, his friend turned to him and said, “I told you she could beat you up!” What?? Melissa later suggested that perhaps our stylish steel-toed boots give this impression. Apparently, though, I came off as a leader to them. I did feel pretty accomplished keeping all 35 of them quiet and attentive during our initial briefing of safety (stay out of the road) and why and how we mulch. I also intentionally hooked my aviators on the top of my sweatshirt for the morning in spite of the overcast sky. Because these things matter with high school boys.
We had lunch at the gazebo cookout then headed back to the tool containers to label lots and lots of tools with P&P stickers, continuing the work we’d started yesterday. The rest of our afternoon, which turned out to be quite a rainy one, was filled with this labeling. We began at the tool containers then moved to the tool trailer outside the P&P office building then back to a small container next to the first long one with which we’d started. Lots and lots of stickers and tape.
Our evening was pretty excellent. We had a team meeting before dinner – the weekly Wednesday specialty roles meeting which will now be the weekly Wednesday team dinner – because Buck is back as a Team Trainer (the specialty role responsible for teambuilding exercises) and brought with him the knowledge of his composite team practices. He started a weekly practice of each sharing a high and a low from the past week. For this week, we did a high and something we’d like the team to improve on so he can appropriately tailor future teambuilders. My high was returning to Moveable Feast.
After the meeting, we had team dinner for the second night in a row! Crazy, I know. Melissa made chili, half vegetarian and half with chicken, which was most delicious. I’ll need to get her recipe for my TL days. Sabrina made brownies from mix for dessert. Also quite good. I forced Melissa back into our pre-spring-break workout routine with a walk twice around the loop afterwards. It wasn’t a huge workout, but it was a good first step back into things after over a week off running. It was a great routine to get back into and I laughed a lot along the way.
Day 74 – Thursday April 22, 2010
I had a stellar day today. Let’s start with Happy Earth Day! and go from there.
I awoke to a foggy grey morning, so much so that I decided to forego my usual drive-to-work sunscreen application. We headed at 8 AM to the Parks & People office, where we learned from Abby that we’d be splitting our day between two Earth Day volunteer events. Good start.
Our morning event was at a United Church of Christ in the Locust Park neighborhood of BMore. Our site would have been within eyeshot of Inner Harbor except that the UnderArmour sports gear national headquarters building was between us and the water. I love UnderArmour and was happy to hear from Jim, the pastor who was the primary church presence at the event, that the company is a very good corporate neighbor.
The volunteer morning was lots of fun. We were joined by students from Francis Scott Key Elementary/Middle School, which is about two blocks from the church. The student group included some adorable young kids, perhaps second grade, who sang a gardening song at the opening remarks. The other major attendee was Maryland Lieutenant Governor Brown, who brought about ten staff members and came out to plant stuff. Mary from Parks & People, who had set up the natural play space at EcoFest, coordinated the volunteer efforts. We got a picture with the lieutenant governor, part of that political photo op series taken before a politician leaves an event, and all told him what states we’re from. It was lots of fun.
Our role in the service project did not, for the most part, involve the students this time. While Amanda worked with children planting things inside the fence, most of us headed outside the church fence into the UnderArmour parking lot and pulled dead vine fragments and tons of live English ivy off the fence; Chris and Brandon also removed barbed wire from the top. Removing vines reminded me of our work our very first day with Parks & People pulling vines off the outside of the Duncan Street Miracle Garden fence. I had lots of fun with it.
Sabrina found out just before lunch that she’d be heading back to Perry Point from this afternoon to tomorrow morning to move forward with her pet project of starting up a Corps community garden in the Village. As a result, she asked me to take her spot on the upscale ISP tonight. Possible awesome ISP? Duh I said yes.
We drove from Locust Park, the first neighborhood community garden having been officially planted by the students, to Carroll Park at 2 PM. We found Abby there at the volunteer day, which was a joint Ravens football team staff and M&T Bank event. She led us down the main path beside the golf course to our work sites. While three people started out lining a small newly-planted-by-volunteers garden with rocks, the rest of us headed further along to a medium pond. The pond was split into two smaller ponds by a ground-level rock divide about 10 feet wide through which a channel ran connecting the two bodies of water. Lots and lots of trash builds up in the pond and on the rocks. Our job was to help the volunteers already there remove some of that trash. They had already collected about twenty bags of trash by the time we arrived, between paddling around and cleaning the water and banks in three canoes and walking down to the water’s edge. We added to the giant pile of trash bags with our (mostly on-land) collection. I focused on collecting trash out of the dead invasive stalks on the land abutting the boat launch. After about 30 minutes, Molly, the very enthusiastic volunteer coordinator, told me that I could go ahead and bag up the invasives and the trash all together because they would all end up in the same place (incinerator or landfill). This sped up my work immensely and I ended up with five big brown paper leaf bags full of invasives and trash. Mmm, accomplishment.
After a full day of Earth-ness, we hopped into the Vanimal for the ride to our ISP, changing into our AmeriTuxes (the sharp black pants and white polos we wore for induction) during our RiteAid stop along the way. The five volunteer slots offered to us were taken up by Jeff, Lindsay, Chris, Amanda, and myself. The rest of the team had not been interested in an additional four hours of ISP after a full service day; we ended up totally lucking out.
The event was Hope in the Harbor, a $175-per-plate fundraiser for the St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. It was held at a museum in Inner Harbor and we knew that Duff from Charm City Cakes, the head guy on the television show Ace of Cakes, was a big guest at the event. The entire affair ended up being totally awesome.
It took a while to find out where we needed to be once we got there. Namely actually gaining entrance to the building took about twenty minutes since the door guards didn’t know volunteer coordinator Ken by name and he didn’t think he’d need to come to the door when I called him because we were volunteers so should get let in. Fortunately, he did eventually come find us and everything was smooth sailing from then on.
Ken was completely on top of his game organization-wise and already had all of us divided up into our roles for the night. Jeff and Amanda were posted at the silent auction, helping bidders with the process and guarding against wandering items. Lindsay and Chris were ushers in the main dining hall, helping people find the way downstairs and generally being available for questions and such. I was a greeter. My job was to stand by the front door, welcome people to the event, shake hands, and point them to reception and the wine tasting and silent auction beyond.
I found my station and met the four women with whom I’d be working. Two of them, Joann and Carol, introduced themselves right away and got to chatting. They spent most of our hour together asking me questions about NCCC; Carol and I only got to greet about five parties each as a result. Carol was in her forties and showed me pictures of her twin boys. Joann is 79 and told me repeatedly how much more she knows at 80 than she knew at 50. She shared with me stories of the service she engages in, Ken assigned us both to the 9 PM silent auction item-distribution shift as greeting wore down, and we spent the rest of the night wandering the event together.
An evening with Joann is a grand adventure. We headed upstairs to the main dining room, where we watched speakers present moving, emotion-filled testimonies about the amazingness of St. Jude’s. We then headed back to the kitchen with my teammates for some leftover hors d’ouvres since Joann was quite hungry. The event’s live auction was just finishing with an awesome grand finale when we returned from the kitchen. As we watched and listened, the final item – a custom-made cake from Charm City Cakes – went for a mind-boggling $15,000. Even more impressive, Duff asked if the bidder who had been competing with the winner would be willing to make a matching bid. When he assented, Duff agreed to go ahead and make two custom cakes. One cake became two and fifteen thousand dollars for St. Jude’s became thirty thousand. Kind of insane but also really awesome. (I later learned from Ken that 85 cents from every dollar donated to St. Jude’s goes into the hospital and research, with only 6 cents going to administrative expenses.)
Joann’s philosophies, of which she shared many, include ‘Live life to the fullest.’ She enacted this by leading me to pretty much every food table at the event after the silent auction. The main room was lined with tables set up by local restaurants and she took it upon herself to try food from almost every one during our hour break. (Volunteers sampling the food was completely fine with all involved, at least wherever she’s involved.) I was keeping her company, chatting and offering an arm on stairs and making sure she got water when she needed it, and so of course joined her as she walked around the event. She encouraged me to try almost all that she did, leading me to test some very unexpected delicacies. (Duck is yuck but whatever that squishy Lebanese thing was it was great.) My favorites were the desserts. I tried a cinnamon roll and the famous Captain Crunch french toast (overrated, in my opinion) from the Blue Moon Café. When we got back to the silent auction level, I got to try pumpkin chocolate chip cake from Charm City Cakes! It was fantastic. Dangerously Delicious Pies had chocolate pie and a chocolatier was set up in the silent auction room. Basic summary: awesome.
I ended the night with more Joann time. Her favorite things to discuss included how happy she is in life (she’d be ready to die tomorrow with no regrets), the constant presence of God, my apparent ‘old soul’, how much she likes people, how much she likes me and we connect, and lessons learned during a long and happy life (e.g. keep your thoughts positive, as they control all; if you have aches and negativity, acknowledge then release them and move on). I had a lot of fun walking around with her, offering a helping hand where I could, learning from her carefree seize-every-moment style, and enjoying amazing food together which I would otherwise have been very unlikely to try (instead leaving it for the guests as my Joann-free teammates tended to do, having not walked up and asked about trying things as she did).
Summary of the day: Met the lieutenant governor. Filled five leaf bags with invasives and trash. Discussed NCCC with inquisitive people. Ate Charm City Cakes (i.e. famous) cake. Made a new friend. Tons of unexpected awesomeness. In case you missed it, I love this program.
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