Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Any Volunteers?

USA Today recently reported on how charitable Americans are with their time and money. Not surprisingly financial donations are down; however, the number of people volunteering is trending upwards. A long-time financial contributor myself and but usually a step or two behind the trendy, I'm happy to say that I, too, can now be counted among the volunteers.

In October I started volunteering at a cat shelter, Furkids. In some ways it was a selfish decision. I finally came to accept the reality that I am never going to be a humanitarian, a Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Duke or Sloan, and that the only thing my name will likely adorn will be a grave stone, a very grand one, mind you, but a grave stone nonetheless. Humbled by this epiphany, I began thinking of how I could make a difference in the world, and naturally cats came to mind. I toyed with the idea of helping people, like supporting literacy efforts and teaching immigrants conversational English, but helping people is why we have churches, right? So, cats won the day.

It's a no-kill, cage-less shelter with about eleven good-sized rooms where the cats hangout on elaborate cat trees and shelves, and I would estimate that there's well over 100 cats total. I'm generally assigned a room or two to clean litter boxes, refresh water and food bowls and sweep and mop the room. It doesn't leave a lot of time for socializing (industry speak for petting) the cats, which was my true desire when I started but I'm OK with that. The world needs its ditch diggers and this shelter needs its litter scoopers.

This isn't my first volunteer gig. When we lived in Ithaca, Ida and I both volunteered at the Cortland County SPCA doing pretty much what I do now except the cats were all in cages. I got sucked into running for and winning a seat on the Board of Directors, thinking that I would be even better positioned to do some good. Man, was I an idiot. Small town politics usurped every meeting, and frustrated that we hadn't done a thing to help the animals, I stepped down and never looked back. I'll do most anything for cats...except work with small-minded people. If I win the lottery, I'll start my own shelter and/or a ranch where disabled and disadvantaged kids can ride horses and care for other farm animals. Until then, I'm satisfied with the grunt work of keeping the cat rooms clean.

Lest you think I care for animals more than I do people...oh, wait...I do care for animals more than I do people! But I'm not completely lacking in compassion for my own. This year I donated to the Haiti relief efforts, helped Ida serve dinner at a Ronald McDonald house, collected and redeemed yogurt tops to fight breast cancer, and for the past three holiday seasons I've donated to the Atlanta Food Bank and Heifer International. This year through Heifer I gave the gift of honey bees. It's not nearly enough to get a building wing, street corner, or elementary school named after me (they'd probably spell my name wrong anyway), but that's alright. I can only do what I can do and hope it makes a difference to someone...or something.

Here kitty, kitty, kitty...

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