Have fun

Yesterday the little girl my younger daughter babysits asked her if going to college is fun. She told her it was, but that got her thinking about this odd category of “fun.” And so I wound up telling her this story from back when I was in college.

A bunch of us were signed up to volunteer with what was then called the Philadelphia Committee for the Homeless. Every week we distributed sandwiches and hot or cold beverages, depending on the weather, but the food was really just a pretext for checking in with the city’s homeless population. Every week each team of volunteers would go to the same area to visit with the same people and keep track of how they were doing.

Our little zone was around Independence Hall. We’d start in Washington Square (which, in the ’80s, was still as bad as Jane Jacobs described it), then work our way up past the Liberty Bell to the Jewish History museum. (It was illegal at that time to distribute food to homeless people in the national park. The rangers weren’t dickish about it, but they still made you cross the street.) After doing that every week for a semester, we’d gotten to know our folks pretty well and where to find them.

And but so, it was February and the kind of really lousy February night where it’s not quite cold enough for the rain to turn into snow. And it was raining hard. Our team of volunteers was quickly soaked to the skin. The Temple student who kept our list was struggling to keep the clipboard dry inside a plastic bag and we were all feeling like jerks because we all wanted to be complaining about having to be outside on a night like that and, well, just think about that for a minute.

So anyway, we were hunkered down under an awning near the Bourse with our sandwiches and our big thermos of hot tea when we see Mick coming. That was a nickname — he had a beard and a British accent and was about 6’7″, so he looked kind of like a skinnier, weather-worn version of Mick Fleetwood. He was a heroin addict and a really sweet man who spent a lot of his time doing the same thing we were out there doing — making the rounds of all the usual spots to check in with the homeless people in the neighborhood and keep track of how they were. When somebody was in crisis, we often heard about it from Mick.

We usually didn’t see Mick until we got to the Jewish museum, so we knew something was up. “Charlie fell,” he told us. “His ankle’s broken.” So we headed up to the little courtyard at the museum to see Charlie and, yep, it was bad.

Charlie needed to go to the hospital. That meant — despite already being cold and wet and tired — we wouldn’t be getting on the van when it came back around at the end of the night. We’d have to let them know (we didn’t have cell phones then), then wait for them to finish picking up and returning all the other teams before coming back to get us, and Charlie, and Mick (because Charlie was, we think, schizophrenic, and genuinely scared of hospitals and of me and of pretty much everyone else, and that was the only way we could convince him to go). And then we’d all have to head to Jefferson where we’d have to persuade them to accept a filthy patient who had no ID and no insurance and who was loudly proclaiming that he didn’t want to be there. (EMTALA was a few years old at this point, but hospitals still weren’t always inclined to heed it.)

And it was still raining. Hard.

Fortunately, Charlie settled down once we got to the emergency room, and the nurse who looked at him and saw a man with a broken ankle quickly overruled the fussy receptionist who had looked at him and seen only a homeless person without insurance. When we eventually left about a half-hour later we were confident that his ankle and his dignity were being treated as they should be and that folks from PCH would be there to help him once he was released.

We swung by the museum to drop off Mick, then headed back to 802 North Broad to climb into our car and drive back to St. Davids, blasting the heater and trying not to think about how soon we needed to be in class in the morning.

So it was after 1 am when I finally got back to my dorm, tired and cold and wet, and smelling more than a bit like Charlie. As I was cutting through the TV lounge, my friend Carl looked up.

“Sheesh, where’ve you been?”

“The PCH thing.”

“Oh. Was it fun?”

There’s that word again. It’s not quite the right word or the right category. The night had been difficult, unpleasant and uncomfortable — none of the things you’re signing up for if you’re looking for a night of fun. Presented with an open-ended question in which I were asked to provide a description of that evening and I would never have reached for the word “fun.” Nor would Mick, or Charlie, or the nurse at Jeff. “Fun” seems reductive and dismissive, like some inconsequential amusement or time-killing diversion.

But then what is the right word or the proper category? Try to imagine a better or more appropriate word and none of them seems quite right either. They all seem a bit too ponderous and self-important. Try as you might to find a better word that captures something deeper or more meaningful than “fun” and every alternative seems less compelling, less attractive than that weirdly inappropriate little word does. Those words don’t seem big enough either.

And in any case, “fun” was the word that Carl used. As such, his question was binary: Fun or Not Fun? Good or bad?

“Yeah,” I told him. “It was fun.”

I mean, sure, we could have done without the rain. But it was.