Rosecrans Baldwin, remembering his experience of volunteering at the drive-through COVID testing centre at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles:
To live in Los Angeles is to exist in a selfish place full of self-helping people: the cliché persists partly because it’s true. But the Southland is also so vast, so diverse, it repels single stories. I asked one staff member, a woman who’d risen to become one of the managers, what she did prior to working at Dodgers. “I lunched,” she said flatly. “I’m a lady who lunches. I mean, I used to be.” My reasons to volunteer were selfish and self-serving: I needed to get out of the house, I enjoyed making new friends. It’s weird. For several years, I’d been crisscrossing L.A. for a book, interviewing dozens of people from the county’s many communities to grasp at some idea of its soul. The Armenian nation state of Glendale. The Vietnamese community in Garden Grove. Suddenly, Saturday mornings, everyone was coming to see me.
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