Service

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

~ Mohandas Gandhi

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So, every year at this time, I am reminded of my second year as an RA.  I decided that it would be good for my residents and me to do community service.  I also decided that it would be fun if we took puppies to a care facility with kids.  We could bring some happiness to kids and we could see some puppies.

I worked with the local animal rescue shelter place and they said that would be fine.  The event was scheduled for the end of November / beginning of December.  I got a call the day before the event and was told that there weren't puppies available, but that one of the volunteers would bring her own dogs out.

While disappointed at the lack of puppies, I was still excited that we were going to do community service.

The day arrived and I drove with about five of my residents to the location for our community service.  The woman with the dogs arrived.  She had two dogs.  Two old dogs.  And she wouldn't let any of us handle them.  She was the only one who could.

Okay, so we were still there.  We could still talk with the kids.

A woman came to the door to meet us.  She was very upbeat and excited for us to be there.

"Which one of you plays the piano?" she asked with great enthusiasm.

At this point, my residents looked at me with more than a little frustration.  First, I told them we would get to play with puppies and kids.  Then it was two adult dogs.  Now there was talk of a piano...  They were not happy.

"I don't know that any of us play the piano," I replied.

The woman didn't miss a beat.  "No problem," she smiled.  "You can sing acapella.  We'll have you sing to the adults first."

I avoided eye contact with my residents.  No puppies.  Adults.  And now we were singing...

"Excuse me," I said to the woman, "What is it that you told the residents here we were going to do?"

She said, "Well, I told them you'd bring some animals and that you would be singing Christmas carols."

"Oh," I said.

There was a room with about 15 people in chairs waiting for us when we got inside.  There was a piano, too, but the piano was just going to keep waiting because no one knew how to play it.

"Um...  what Christmas carols do you want to sing?" I asked.  Kind of pretending like this had been the plan all along and that they knew we were going to do this and maybe they just forgot I told them.  They didn't fall for it.

"What are you talking about?!" someone asked.

I explained the mix-up.  I apologized.  I begged them to sing with me.  Whatever carols they wanted.  We were here, people just wanted us to spend some time with them.

They finally agreed.

Well, you know how you sing along with carols on the radio or at a concert or whatever?  Well, do you realize that you don't really know the words if you aren't singing along with others?  I didn't realize that until that day.

I believe we tried to sing "Joy to the World" and "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" and maybe "The Twelve Days of Christmas."  We didn't make it through any of those.

The smiling woman who greeted us smiled a little less.  The woman with the dogs kind of pretended she wasn't with us.  The dogs even flopped on the floor - apparently out of disgust.  Our audience was not impressed.  Their attention shifted quickly to the two elderly dogs lying in the back of the room.

We finally figured out that we knew all the words to "Frosty the Snowman."

The audience applauded.  But it was the kind of applause when you hope the performance is over not the kind where you're telling the performers they were awesome.

Our guide then took us to the room where the kids were.  We only sang "Frosty."  They petted the dogs.  I think maybe they were coloring or something and maybe we helped them with that.

The moral of the story is...  well, I guess it is try to do good things and stuff.