I cannot call him. I tell Donna instead, and she is not Carl but she is Donna, which is its own significant thing.
Ruth’s involvement in the program has been, practically, a significant improvement. She has contacts and organizational skills and a particular way of recruiting volunteers that is slightly more direct than my approach and that works better with certain populations. She does not compete with me; she supplements. That is the best kind of working relationship.
I think Carl would have liked Ruth. He liked people who were efficient and honest and who didn’t require management. Ruth requires no management. She is the one doing the managing, most of the time, and she does it without needing credit for it, which is a quality I have always found rare and valuable.
At the December planning meeting, the last one of the year, Ruth brought a plate of cookies she had made, which was not something she had done at previous meetings. She put them in the middle of the table without announcement, and they were gone within twenty minutes. Someone asked who brought them and she said she had and then we moved on to the agenda.
It was such a small thing. It made me think about how much of what makes a life good is the accumulated small things. The plate of cookies at the meeting. The phone call on a Tuesday for no reason. The text with an article you thought someone would find useful.