Some people donate because they recognize me as representing the street's charitable door-to-door canvasser, and respond out of a sense of what might be called obligation to society. Others no doubt respond grudgingly, fed up with seeing me once again representing the interests of yet another charitable enterprise. Reflecting, in fact, what I feel myself as being too often at their doors in every season, for yet another reason.

It's cruelly cold out, and doing this door-to-door canvass, entreating neighbours to be charitable and give to various causes like Heart & Stroke, Cancer, CNIB, Arthritis, Diabetes, MS, and any other groups that have approached me to represent their interests as a reluctant volunteer, is no pleasure - at any time of year. In January it represents pure misery.

But, although I gird myself psychologically to repress my instinct to reply in the affirmative, I too often do. I tell those recruiters to work a little harder at impressing others besides myself, of their volunteer obligations to society. Forty years of canvassing is enough for anyone. They wail that there's no one on my street to take up the cudgel. And looking at their records, remind me of how much I had collected last time around.

The urge to restrain myself dies a slow death and I end up most often agreeing to trudge around the neighbourhood on behalf of yet another charity.

Now, each time I pass the canvass kit for the Ontario March of Dimes, where I placed it (to ensure it doesn't slip my mind), prominently on a table in the foyer, I feel it glaring at me, demanding that I fulfill my duty, get out there and do the canvassing.

And then I look at the thermometer that tells me it's cold enough to cause frostbite, and I demur.