one more step toward becoming my mother

There are many traits I inherited from my mom. My impatience with bullshit, for one; also, I think, my love of dancing. My tendency toward being a packrat. Definitely my love of reading, including my enjoyment of reading cookbooks.

It's hard to say, though, whether my inclination to join a thousand different groups and committees comes from her, my dad, both, or (most likely) is a trait handed down through the generations of my civically engaged family, evolved and perfected just like our OCD and hair loss.

Regardless, I am definitely a joiner. In high school I was in 17 clubs, played two sports, directed plays, joined the orchestra. What they don't tell you then is that it's all preparation for when you become an Adult and have to actually do the dirty work in order to keep getting to do any of the fun stuff. I figured it out fairly easily along the way, though, and I believe strongly in doing some of the dirty work, particularly when it benefits something that in turn benefits me, like the contra dance community.

Well, thinking that way apparently is the same as putting a big "Gullible" sign on your forehead, because I had barely settled into life here when it was suggested to me that I join pretty much every dance-related committee in western New England. (I choose to think it's flattering, rather than thinking they simply smelled fresh blood in the water.)

Tonight I became an official member of the board of the "Friends of the Guiding Star Grange," and honestly I'm thrilled with this because the Grange is what drew me up here in the first place, and it's where I found the community of people in which I felt instantly at home. The dancing that happens there, which it's the mission of the Friends to support, is one of the greatest sources of joy in many people's lives and allows a beautiful old American tradition to live on. It's exciting to get to actively support that mission, not to mention that the board members are fun people to hang out with (or that I'm an opinionated person, and here is a forum in which I'm supposed to be opinionated about the way things happen, as long as I am willing to back it up with some work).

Before we even got to the part of the meeting agenda where the board voted me on as a member, I had volunteered for several tasks, most notably a joint effort to overhaul the semi-annual FGSG newsletter. My mother would be so proud. There is nothing I've known her to volunteer for more over the years than putting out the newsletter, be it of the synagogue, the local Community Foundation (of which she just became - talk about being a joiner - the unpaid interim director), the environmental learning center, what-have-you. I come from a family of writers and editors, so we not only enjoy these types of projects but tend to go up the wall when we see how (badly) they're usually done by others.

The good news is that I get to work on it with some great people, and there's space for creativity and new ideas about how the newsletter can hopefully really be fun to read and get more people interested in dancing and joining the Friends, rather than just another source of clutter for my fellow packrats and me. The bad news is that I feel like it's a little early to turn into my mother, especially since her example shows that from newsletter editor to 50-hour-a-week-unpaid-organization-rescuer is a slippery and often thankless slope. And that turning into her probably doesn't mean I can avoid the hair loss gene, even though she did.

Oh well. You win some; you lose some. (Though hopefully not all... at least not for a while.)