The Last Chapter

Years ago - before Caroline was born - I was an officer in a local organization for women physicians. I don't quite remember how I got involved in this, but both the president and vice-president were spouses of people I knew from work, so that probably had something to do with it. I remember there were some meetings at people's houses, and that we sponsored a reception for a distinguished Emory faculty member who had just gotten a lifetime achievement award from a national organization. I spent an enormous amount of time putting together several issues of a newsletter for the group. I used WordPerfect, which at least at the time wasn't optimal software for newsletter publishing, and it was a lot of trouble, just to get it to look right. And I spent a lot of time working on content. This was before Google, so I was on the lookout in the newspaper for news about women physicians in the community that might be of interest. Once it was all done, I'd take it to Kinko's and get it copied on ledger-sized paper and folded for mailing, then print out mailing labels on my 9-pin printer and put it in the mail. I think the three of us did a pretty good job, but then I had my first child and I had no more time to spend on putting together a newsletter or for that matter much of anything else. I don't remember what happened after that, and I had forgotten about it.

A year or two ago I heard from Rachel, who had been president when I was the secretary, with the news that somehow there never was a successful handoff to the next set of officers. This wouldn't have mattered so much, but there was still quite a bit of money in the organization's bank account, and we had to do our due diligence to either try to find some new officers or officially put the group out of business. Carol, the former vice-president, no longer lived in Atlanta, so it was just Rachel and I. Rachel hired someone to send out a letter to our distribution list and there was a meeting at a restaurant, somewhere, to see if anyone was interested in taking the chapter over. No one was. There was one more outreach and then - absent any alternative - the decision was to close the bank account and send the money to the national organization.

So Rachel tried to do that, but it turned out that only Carol and I were signatories on the account. Rachel sent me the paperwork to get her added to the account but I never got it done. I would periodically get an email from her, asking when I could go to the bank with her to close out the account. The times that worked for her were always bad for me. There were a few final checks a couple of months ago, covering the costs of mailing and a deposit Rachel had made just to keep the account active. But the days I took off from work and had time to go to the bank were not days that worked for her.

Then, on Monday I had to go to the Bank of America to deposit some money for the Girl Scout's fall product sale. Girl Scout product sales - including the cookies that will be on sale in a few months - are set up as cash sales. The directions say don't keep more cash than you can afford to replace if it's lost or stolen, but you have to go to the bank in person to deposit it, which suggests to me that they think all their volunteers work for Bank of America (and can easily do this, during the hours the bank is open). But I digress. So I emailed Rachel and told her I would try to close the account while I was there, and if she would tell me what to do with the check, I would mail it.

At the bank that afternoon, I deposited my $57 for the Girl Scouts, and then told the teller I needed to close an account. Personal? A business? An organization, I told him; I showed him the checkbook. It would be a few minutes; have a seat.

Just a couple of minutes later I was invited into an office, and the banker pulled up the account. Carol and I were signatories on it; did I have ID? I gave him my driver's license. I told him I wanted to purchase a cashier's check for the balance of the account; he said they'd give me the cashier's check, that I didn't have to buy it. So I wrote a last check for the account balance - $19,720.24 - to the American Medical Women's Association, and he asked a little apologetically for a second ID ("because of the size of the check.") I gave him my passport. He disappeared with the check, my driver's license, and my passport and came back a few minutes later with my documents and a cashier's check, made out to AMWA. It was done.

That evening Rachel emailed me a cover letter to send with the check, and asked what the final amount was. I told her, and that the banker had told me that the account had been opened sixty years ago. She responded back that it said a lot about how things had changed for women physicians that there apparently was no longer a recognized need for a local organization like this one (although she thought there was still a need at the national level). I thought this was an interesting observation, and she may be right - on the other hand, organizations generally are not fairing so well in modern life. I asked her if she'd read Bowling Alone. No, she replied, should she? Yes, I told her, it's one of my favorite books.

In his book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam makes the case that both formal and informal social ties have massively frayed in the modern United States, and that this actually matters - that social ties contribute in important ways both to our personal well-being and the strength of our nation. Thinking back to all that time I spent putting together that newsletter, years ago, and putting a first class stamp on each one and dropping the bundles in the mail - it was an effort to tie together somehow a group of busy professional women who were too busy in the end to keep the organization going.

Sixty years ago, there were many fewer women in the medical profession, and they were of a generation that were more organizationally-inclined than their daughters and granddaughters. Now, of course, if we did want to network with other women physicians in the community we would do it differently. If we had a newsletter at all, it would go out by email, but we probably wouldn't have a newsletter; we'd have a website or a Facebook group or a blog. (This is one of the reasons that the Postal Service is in trouble.) But we're busy - we have jobs and kids and causes we're passionate about - and maybe this category doesn't resonate any more.

On Tuesday morning on my way to work I dropped the letter into the mailbox.