Lisa did not do this volunteer work out of any great sense of compassion, nor out of any need to feel that she was giving back to the community. Her parents’ enthusiasm for that deftly made up for any lacking of hers in that department. How often they would grind in her ear about how fortunate they were, and how they should look for ways to help out the community that had been so good to them. It seemed to Lisa that they were feeling a little bit guilty about being relatively well-off. It is true that both of her parents had dreamed of becoming doctors when they grew up so that they could do some good in this world. It wasn’t their fault that the price of that dream was to be plagued with a pretty nifty income; every job has its pluses and minuses, after all. Lisa was all too familiar with their win-win lecture about how assisting in the hospital would not only be of benefit to others, but how valuable it would also be in mitigating her thoroughly selfish tendencies. In any case, from where she was standing, they were the surgeons getting all the praise and the glory, while she was merely Ms. Anonymous doing all the giving back for the family. One thing was for sure, Lisa felt that she was far too young to have benefitted so much from the world that it was already her time to have to pay back.
Continued