TNT ... Chicago 21
1 Could he really consider it to be volunteering if he tracked the time he spent at the veterans' support meetings so that he could submit them to count toward his community service hours? 2 That was the type of question he entertained as he waited every week for the event to end.
3 He most certainly was racking up the hours, week by week, showing up early at the church to take the chairs from the storage closet to set them up in the small meeting room, getting the coffee started, putting out the doughnuts or the pastries or the stale cookies ... and then lurking around in the shadows trying to not get all depressed by the war stories -- and especially the *after* war stories that they all shared eventually -- after weeks of prompting from the moderator. 4 Then, as the group dissipated after the gathering, he would assist those who needed help to depart since the space's accessibility features dated back decades to when the ADA was first starting to be enforced.
5 J wasn't on teardown duty -- only set up -- so that meant he could decompress out in the parking lot sharing a cigarette or two with whomever else was dawdling. 6 It was in those moments that he started to form the most basic of relationships with several of the guys. 7 John was one of the first he had met that way. 8 That week weeks ago, John had been having some kind of trouble with his prosthetics, and he had arrived at the meeting with some rickety borrowed wheelchair. 9 It had gotten stuck in a rut in the hallway by the front door, and J was the one who pushed him all the way out to the parking lot.
10 After that, it was all grunts and head nods of acknowledgement for a bit of time, and then, one day, one of them bummed a smoke ... or a light ... and the conversation started. 11 Never too too many words ... and definitely not any sharing of anything personal -- the few times it happened during the meeting were painfully exhausting enough -- but the smallest of small talk was permitted. 12 The weather ... the news ... the sports ... anything that was covered in the first few minutes of the half hour news update was fair game.
13 It had taken a few more post-meeting-parking-lot-cigarettes before they struck up the business relationship side of their acquaintanceship, but, sure enough, in time, J would spend the end of the evening buying John's meds that he had stopped taking so that he could resell them to his friends and other moderately friendly connections he ran into out at the clubs.
14 So maybe the question on his mind should have been could he really consider it to be volunteering if he was submitting the time spent there for community service credit AND using it to launch his side career as a small time drug dealer?
