In which GC and I suddenly notice we’re not young

This post is dedicated to XUP, who seems to be missing the GC posts.

Last night GC and I attended an event called TimeRaiser, which took place, oddly, amongst the tanks and fighter jets at the War Museum.

I think the TimeRaiser concept is absolutely brilliant. You pay $20 to get in. For the first couple of hours it’s basically a job fair for volunteers. You go from booth to booth, meeting representatives of non-profit organizations to see what kind of volunteer opportunities are available. Then you submit a card indicating which organizations might be a good fit for you.

The next hour is a silent art auction. You bid volunteer hours instead of money. The maximum bid is 150 volunteer hours. If you win a piece of art, you can do all your pledged volunteer hours with one organization or you can split it between multiple organizations.

GC and I were interested in nine of the 30 organizations. (We picked all the same ones because, as XUP says, we’re fused at the hip and must therefore volunteer as a team.) Some of our favourites were organizations we already knew about and liked, such as the Ottawa Folk Festival, Shepherds of Good Hope, and the Good Day Workshop. Others were new to us, like Live, Work, Play and Ottawa Riverkeepers.

As for the art, there were a couple of pieces we liked, but overall I was a little disappointed. I think the organizers could do a lot better in the art department, especially since they actually do buy the art at market value rather than asking artists to donate it.

At some point GC and I became aware that this event was intended for more youthful people than ourselves.*

Our first clue should have been the schedule. This event started at 7:00 and didn’t end until very late. Staying up past midnight in middle age is the equivalent of staying up all night in your 20s, only you have to do it without drugs.

The second clue was that things were printed in a font so small we had trouble reading them even with reading glasses on.

But the dead giveaway was when, the MC, who was kind of annoying in a full-of-himself kind of way, said something about how proud he was to see “so many people of our generation” gathered together to make the world a better place.

I nudged GC. “How come he said ‘our generation’?”

We both looked around the room, and that’s when we noticed we were the oldest people there.

“What’s up with that?” asked GC.

It’s not the first time this has happened either. It’s a recent phenomenon, but lately we’ve been the oldest people at several functions we’ve attended. In fact, at the Dusty Owl reading with Ivan E. Coyote, a woman came up to us and said “I’m going to sit with you guys because everybody else is so much younger than us.”

Even the Prime Minister of Canada and the incoming President of the United States are younger than us. That’s never happened before.

Speaking of politicians, you know who we ran into at the TimeRaiser thing last night? Ottawa Centre MPP Yasir Naqvi, whom I blogged about last week. He’s the author of that disturbing Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Bill 106. Last night he thanked me for “asking those difficult questions” at the community meeting. He was very respectful and gracious about it.

Anyway. GC bid on this piece of art, called the Hockey Net. He went to the max on it. In the end, there was a draw among all the bidders who were willing to pledge 150 hours for that piece, and GC didn’t win it. I bid on some stuff too, but didn’t win anything either.

There are now nine non-profit organizations who have our email addresses and who know that we might be interested in volunteering for them, so I expect we’ll be hearing from them soon.

*This morning I checked the TimeRaiser website, and it wasn’t just our imagination, it really IS aimed at youth. Here’s part of their mission statement: We promote volunteerism amongst Canadians in their 20s to 30s

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