Please! Help! Or Not?

Two weeks ago, the Point Roberts Garden Club people sent out a notice on the Point Interface Email List to inform their neighbors that it was time to come down to Tyee Drive and plant this years’ new daffodil bulbs in the easements so that next spring we will all be gobsmacked by the sight of 20 dozen or so daffs smiling up at us day after day. They were planning the planting for two hours on each of three days the coming week. Monday didn’t work for me because I had a quilting student, but I planned to go down on Tuesday and Thursday to help out. Monday afternoon, I drove by and saw that they had gotten a good start because all the beautiful pink cosmos on one side of the street had been unpended and were lying behind the now-bare raised beds.

But Tuesday morning, the rain was pouring, and I figured that there would be no bulb planting that day. Thursday was no better: more rain. By the weekend, another notice came out as to when they needed help. But that week had its own problems with everyone’s rain and my previously scheduled activities. And, as it happened, the bulb planting still didn’t get done. Finally, a third notice of times came out and I planned to go on the third day. But when I drove by in the afternoon of the second day, it looked like it was already finished, so I didn’t show up on the third day. And it turned out that that was the day they actually finished.

So, what we’ve got here is a failure of communication, or something. The bulbs are all in the ground and I did nothing to help that happen. And that’s okay because other people did manage to get there to make it happen. But I think I need to be either harder on myself, or more generous with others when I notice that they are not showing up for some community work that I did manage to get to do.

I can imagine that one of the conditions for living here would be doing community service. Sort of like military service. Everyone would be required to do five units of community service each year. Okay, I can see right away that that is a genuinely crazy idea because who would decide what constituted a unit of service, who would keep track of laxness, what would punishment be for failure to do service (eviction? exile? who would enforce that?), who would decide who could be excused on grounds of …well, then also who would decide what conditions would be grounds for an excuse? Obviously a bureaucratic nightmare. Better just personal responsibility. It would be a good thing, indeed a morally good thing, if everyone tried to do something for the community each year. But it’s up to each of us to make that happen. The alternative is not a good choice.