Three weeks later, the charity held its annual fundraising gala. Donors and volunteers filled the ballroom as I walked through the entrance, and the room was full and the wine was poured and the board chair was standing at the podium looking at a total on a card that was less than half of what that dinner brings in every year.
Two hundred and eleven of our people had not come.
They had not boycotted anything. Nobody organizes retired people in Lexington, Kentucky. What happened is that they had not been asked in the way they are asked.
The appeal went out digital this year. Beautiful thing, I saw the proof, a video and a link and a button. It went to the whole list.
The list is not the whole list. That is the part I never had the words to explain to anybody, and I have been trying since 1997.
There is a cross-reference in the second drawer of my desk, five index card boxes, one card per donor household. On each card: who they give in memory of, what month their person died, whether they want the mail addressed to both names still even though he has been gone eleven years, and whether they are a woman who cannot see a screen well enough to press a button on a telephone.
That is why every letter got a handwritten line. Not because I am sentimental. Because Mrs. Tandy gives in June every year for her son and if you send her a form letter in March she will feel it as a stranger asking her for money, and if you write one sentence about David in your own hand she will feel it as her charity remembering him.
Two hundred and eleven households give by check, in a month that means something to them, in response to a letter with a line on it. Those checks are sixty-one percent of the annual campaign. I know that because I add it up every January on a legal pad, and I have handed that pad to four different directors, and every one of them thanked me and put it in a drawer.
Under the card boxes is a note from Sister Mary Vincent, who ran the office when I came in and who taught me the cards.
Anna — anybody can ask a thousand people for money. The whole art is asking one person in the month she is already thinking about him. Keep the cards. The cards are the campaign.
The campaign manager found me by the coat check. She is twenty-eight and she had a spreadsheet with fourteen thousand names on it and she genuinely did not know that a thing like my drawer could exist.
We spent February at that desk. She built a proper database and she did it right, and every field on it came off an index card, and she would not let me photocopy them, she typed each one herself and read every line out loud.
The appeal went out in April, on paper, with a line on each one. Hers is on about six hundred of them, in her own hand, which took her three weeks.
We finished the year over. Mrs. Tandy gave in June, for David, the way she does.