I canvassed for Timuel Black and Harold Washington in the early eighties in Chicago and even spent a little time in the campaign office of the Green Party candidate for governor of Minnesota back when I had faith.

After I started taking screenwriting courses at Film in the Cities in Saint Paul, I began volunteering at the school’s movie theater downtown. I was Mr. Sunday Night for three years before I moved away to Minneapolis and downtown Saint Paul became too hard to deal with at night on a bicycle in Winter. I sold tickets and made popcorn and watched many dreary, obscure films—and now and then a wowser—and I picked up the trash afterward.

I joined the Professional Editors Network mostly to find a better job, so maybe that wasn’t volunteering so much as gambling my time like venture capital. As treasurer, I had to report at every meeting, so I would phone in the numbers while the meeting was in progress.

I also volunteered at the Science Museum of Minnesota, which required eight weeks of classes on the subjects I’d need in the Our Minnesota exhibit. I lasted a year and later wrote a history of Minnesota for children.

For five years I did From the Edge on Write On! Radio, a weekly show for writers and writing on KFAI in Minneapolis. I would get to the studio a few minutes before I was to go on, usually just after the calendar, and I’d be back home in time to hear the show’s outro. Smooth. For a while after moving to Chico, I did live call-ins. Even smoother.

My first volunteering in Chico was editing and designing the cover of Bidwell Beginnings by Jeanne Bose, published as part of the Bidwell Park Centennial hooplah. It was a great introduction to the area.

Since 2005 I’ve read From the Edge for KZFR, and still other volunteers put them on the air. I also give my time and money to 1078 Gallery, Little Red Hen Nursery, and the Chico Peace and Justice Center. You can, too.

As for the four nonprofit boards I’ve served on, suffice it to say that a buddy of mine made me promise to call him if I ever consider being a director again, and he’ll talk me out of it. He will, too, so don’t even think about it.

Larry stayed at his mother’s place in Queens, and Ken and I got a room at the Parsons YMCA. Based on our budget, we decided that one of us would rent a room and the other would sneak in later. Easy. We took turns sleeping in the bed and the chair.

Three young black men cruised Greenwich Village, Harlem, midtown, Central Park, and the East Side and whenever a cop looked our way we did something that prevented him from thinking that we were at all suspicious and from having any reason to search our conspicuous rented car and find the gun under the seat. No problem.

Larry’s cousin Ingrid lived in an immaculate apartment in Jamaica, a neighborhood in Queens, where her father, who worked for the health department and took it seriously, allegedly terrorized the family and would make Ingrid scrub the woodwork once a week or something equally heinous, and I decided to shoot him.

Not because of the woodwork. I was gonna shoot him because he might stop her going out the next night with me and Ken and another fine young thing. That’s why I had Ken’s .25 automatic when we went to pick up Ingrid and her friend at Ingrid’s incredibly clean apartment.

Her father greeted us at the door and was as cordial as can be, marveling that we’d come all that way and chatted of this and that while we waited for the girls. He wished us well, be back by 1. Later that night she sang for me in a clear contralto I can still imagine.

I didn’t shoot anybody. I thought I was willing to, but it never came up. Had I been found with a pistol, I’d’ve had a serious problem, but I was a good student with no record and I wouldn’t have done any time, unlike Gregory Wright. Now only fear and revenge matter, and compassion and common sense are illegal.

An early girlfriend’s father once said he would never physically reprimand his daughter if I were around because I would come to her rescue and then he’d have to hurt me. He was a perceptive, kind man, and I’m still grateful to him.

Although she has the proper regard for the serial comma, boy, is she wrong. I like cats. Cats like me. In fact, Sammy, a siamese, hangs out in our yard because her housemates pick on her, and now she pays me no mind if we’re out there at the same time and even passes close by me. I can imagine petting her in a few more years. She doesn’t come in the house and I don’t have to feed her or deal with my cat allergy so our relationship is remarkably equable—we don’t owe each other anything. I may plant catnip anyway.

Cats, like the rest of us but maybe not, die. I don’t wish any cat ill, and when I found that lump of decaying protein its catness was gone. There was no catlike grace and assurance, no nothing. That was my judgment, and because for me cats are spirits and personalities, and not so much a particular configuration, I was dealing with a corpse, which is a matter of disposal, not respect.

I do too have compassion for cats, and after a feral cat gave birth under the deck a few years ago I gave them fresh water until they moved out. If one of them had died, though, Waste Management would have been my disposal method.

I suppose all this depends on what we think happens to cats, and us, after death. Even if I thought that physical death was the end of everything, funerals and graves and memorial services and the rest are for the living and not a reliable indicator of respect paid Whatever. I think a corpse is a corpse, and however much you esteemed the late Whatever was obvious while Whatever was alive, whether you realized it or not. What you do now is irrelevant to Whatever because Whatever isn’t around any more. I don’t doubt that if I’d met the cat that once animated that lump in the yard we could’ve gotten along famously, but, alas, that was not to be.

She, and yes I think it’s a woman I’ll call “Sacramento Sally” because of the postmark, accused me of “heartlessness and arrogance” and said, “Your insensitive, uncaring attitude and behavior make me sick to my stomach!” Given the enthusiasm of her judgments and the power over her well-being that she forced on a total stranger, namely me, I bet it’s hard to be around her, and even harder to be her. Namaste, Sally.

She also called me an asshole, on which accusation opinion so far varies somewhat, and then she said that she actually chose her occupation because it was “easier than putting up with jerks like you. I’m offended because you think you deserve the right to throw that word around.”

I’m sure there are myriad jobs of work that for the average Jane would be less taxing than putting up with me. I took a long time finding compassion and affection for myself, and I’m not offended when someone doesn’t like me. I feel for her.

So my reader was offended by the story she made up about how she thinks I think I “deserve the right to throw that word around.” She apparently accepts no responsibility for the thoughts in her own personal head or the way she feels when she thinks them. Instead, she blames it all on me, who has never even seen her head. I’d’ve expected her eventually to notice that bad feelings accompany certain of her thoughts and not others, but if the bad thoughts came about only because of my assholery anyway, I guess the bad feelings are also out of her control. I was tempted to allude to the possibility of thinking deliberately, but I didn’t think her likely to take advice from a jerk or an asshole, much less both, so I whipped out my legendary restraint and tried thinking kind thoughts about her. Good practice.

My reader also showed remarkable restraint. She wrote, “I’m willing to bet you’d be the first to pipe up if a white female like myself complained of being worked like a cotton picking nigger, so what gives you the right to use retarded?”

I don’t see the connection between those two clauses, but I am retarded, so I won’t sweat it. Still, the heart of this jerk swells with admiration for my reader’s nice manners and sense of decency, because a lesser person might have come right out and called me a cotton picking nigger. My gentle reader, though, resisted the temptation to resort to an archaic cliché and merely mentioned it in passing, though I suggest hyphenating cotton-picking when used as an adjective. I also feel for her because I hear picking cotton is back-breaking work.

I used “retarded” this time as an afterthought and at first attributed my initial rejection of yoga to “insanity,” which nobody seems to mind. Then I decided or realized that since I eventually came to a better understanding, I could be described as slow in developing whatever faculty was involved in the decision. I was “retarded,” off the pace.

C— or R— suggests that I could have used a less loaded term and still made my point. Obviously, and offense is still a choice, though perhaps an unconscious one, and I think the cause of hurt feelings may be the judgment that intellectual facility is of primary importance to all people everywhere, and so those whose intelligence is deemed deficient are victims of misfortune and it’s bad juju to mention it.

I used to think that intellect was the most important thing in life. As much as anything, I thought that way because I attended public primary and secondary schools, where it was made clear for 12 fucking years that fast, accurate answers were students’ highest duty after obedience to all authority, including the janitor. Children who couldn’t remember enough facts or respond quickly or stay in line were devalued and failed by teachers, and denigrated and ostracized by other children.

Now I don’t think much of conventional intelligence. It’s just conventional and useful for making things, especially out of petroleum. I don’t think of retarded, or intellectually challenged, or developmentally disabled, or downright stupid people as deficient or unable to have a rich life experience or in any way less than I am. I respect tardos as people and thinking of them or hearing someone refer to them or me as retarded doesn’t make me feel bad.

A friend suggested that labels are lies anyway. Yes, they are, and labels for realities are about all language has to offer. If a label is a useful lie, I’m fine with it. R— or C—sounds like a good person, at least that’s my judgment, and I hope she or he can accept that nobody controls language, no matter how kindly their motives. Relax, it’s all good.