Obligations

I checked the museum's email this morning. It appears a trip down the luge run (or maybe it's a skeleton run -- I will be facing forward while going down The Hill; not staring at the sky and screaming) is on the agenda for tomorrow. We sold another lot of vintage ladies' hankies so as the secretary/treasurer I get to go down, stuff them into an envelope, and haul the package to the post office. It may be the last lot of decorative snot rags out of the ones listed on Ebay a couple weeks ago. If only the other weirdness we'd like to get rid of would move as fast. Alas, the market for vintage laminated Tigers souvenir placemats apparently 'borrowed' from a Big Boy restaurant or an 1890s guide to American artists (Recent Ideals of American Art; a book that's both humongous and heavy) is apparently limited. We've got half a dozen of the placemats. No one wants them. Ditto the art book.

The museum's been on my mind a lot lately anyway. Besides the Ebay stuff and thinking about the water stains on the ceiling (just how many shingles go missing every time there's a strong north wind?) I'm worried about summer. At this point we have zero, nada, zilch, absolutely no volunteers waiting in the wings to serve as docents. Our older members who are still breathing and used to volunteer have hit that stage of fragility in geezerhood that doesn't allow them to deal with being on their feet as much as a docent has to be; our younger members (a depressingly small number) all have conflicting obligations, like jobs. We don't have anyone who hits that sweet spot: old enough to be retired, young enough to still be physically fit and reasonably agile. 

It is, to put it mildly, going to truly suck if we get two really nice new exhibits up and there's no one available to unlock the front door so visitors can see them. (The S.O. and I have a conflicting commitment for this coming summer; we will not be around to see what, if anything, happens between the end of May and Labor Day.)