The donor center is the last bastion of civility
“Braiding Sweetgrass,” she cawed from the other side of the room. “By someone named Robin something. Robin Kimmerer, I think.” The source of this unsolicited book recommendation was Sandra, an eighty-six-year-old musician and Quaker. Since the 1960s — Sandra later told me — she’d donated “probably about three hundred pints” of blood. She was such a prolific giver, that when President Nixon proclaimed the first National Blood Donor Month in 1970 — which still is January — she was interviewed on TV. I met Sandra in early January. We were half-sitting, half-lying foot-to-foot in a donor center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
