May I help you?

I'm in Chicago, visiting my friend J. She and I have spent the evening poring over Mediterranean cookbooks to the dulcet strains of Peter Jackson's King Kong, and now she's curled up in bed and my sleeping bag lies open on the floor and I'm standing up to turn off the lights by the door.

I notice the light on in the closet that serves as a passageway to the bathroom. Since I hate sleeping in anything but cave-blind darkness, I stick my head in and crane my neck around, searching for a switch.

"How do you shut off the closet light?" I ask.

"Oh." Her drowsy voice sounds apologetic. "You can't. It had a string you pulled, but it came off and I keep forgetting to call the landlord, so the light's been on about three weeks."

"Three weeks?" I say. "Do you have a chair?"

We drag one into the closet and I climb up to search the light fixture, which resembles an umpire's mask, painted red. No knob or switch presents itself. I reach up to explore the rim and yank my hand back. It's oven hot.

I shake my fingers. "We should take out the light bulb."

"I don't want you burning yourself," J. says.

"It's not going to get any cooler," I answer. "Do you have any gloves?"

As she searches through a bin of winter clothes, I remember a hundred instances of my mother performing similar acts of fix-it rescues. She's pathologically helpful. Show her a person with a flat tire, and she's stopping the car and rooting through the trunk for a jack. Present her with a lost child in a crowded mall, and she's taking his small sweaty hand and marching off in search of a security guard. Become her neighbor and mention a broken window, and she's scaling a ladder with duct tape or filling her hands with splinters yanking a long-forgotten board out of the garage.

Something about it always annoyed me. Part of what I detested was how her attention would shift immediately from me to the helpless loser on the side of the road. I also disliked her openness -- she radiated "I want to help you" like a miniature sun of good will. She moved instantly from dropping and breaking glasses in the kitchen sink and bumping into table corners to possessing a do-or-die confident authority, even if she had no idea how to fix what was broken, and she seemed to do this mostly for strangers.

I didn't realize until a few years ago that I didn't like it because I had it too. Nothing interrupts your life like a rescue compulsion. I think our family was, somewhere far back in history, descended from St. Bernards. I could be screamingly late for an intensely important meeting, dancing in rage at the long lines at the post office, but should an elderly woman in a walker totter toward me on my way out the door, I'll wait five minutes for her to catch up so I can hold it for her.

On one of my summer college breaks, I was heading to the car to meet some friends when I saw a boy, about eight years old, take a tumble from his bicycle on the sidewalk bordering our yard. I think I broke light speed reaching him. He was just getting to his feet, staring at his bleeding hands with a pre-howling-fit horror, and he was all alone.

"Are you okay?" I said. "That was quite a fall. Let me see your hands."

Tears were spilling over his long blond lashes. With liquid blue Bambi eyes fixed on my face, he held out his hands for my inspection. Dirt and grit showed through the cuts under several layers of skin.

"We'd better wash that," I said. "Come on, I'll get you a Band-Aid."

He hung back, quavering, "My mom says I shouldn't go anywhere with strangers."

I wanted to fold him in my arms and keep him safe forever. "She's absolutely right," I said. "We won't go in the house. Just come into the yard and I'll wash your hands with the hose."

A little convinced but still wary, he followed me into the yard. I told him to wait there, went into the house for Neosporin, soap, a washcloth and Band-Aids, and went back out to him to fetch the promised hose. I doctored him up and sent him on his way, hoping that his mother wouldn't yell at him for following a stranger into her yard. My friends wondered why I arrived so late to the party. I shrugged.

You don't toot your horn when you have this thing, this by-product of an insane Boy Scout and a rabid paramedic, living in your chest. It's not something you do to look good. Most of the time it's embarrassing. Often I would love to be invisible, or have no face, or wear a mask. The thanks make me feel ashamed. I'm not that good of a person. I'm often lazy and bitchy and resentful and snide, ungracious to the people closest to me. I don't help out because it's good; I help out because I have no choice. I don't decide to help the man in leg braces reach the other side of the road. I don't choose to lift top-shelf groceries down into the carts of shorter shoppers. I don't choose. Something chooses for me. Helplessness, pain and fear yank out my inner St. Bernard and I'm at it before I've realized what I'm doing. So applause is pointless. I know the deeds are good, but they're not acts deserving of praise. And I can only fix small problems. If I had my way, I'd have a lot more power to fix larger problems, life problems, diseases, emotional trauma, poverty. Of course, I'd royally screw it up if I had that kind of authority, but still, my little episodes of helpfulness serve sometimes as a kind of apology for not being able to do more.

Learning not to fix things has been the hardest lesson of my life. I used to think I could save the world. I wanted to erase every line from every suffering face, I wanted to make people's lives happy and comfortable, and it seemed like everyone was suffering. In short, God wasn't doing it fast enough, and I wanted to take over.

I never got a Bruce Almighty shot -- and doubtless a good thing, too. Instead I failed, over and over, to fix people, and started to realize that a lot of human misery stems from free will, and that people tend to choose the things that will hurt them. Myself included. I chose, many times over, to take on the burdens of others' choices, thinking each time that maybe this person I could heal. It never worked.

But I learned. I can't pull a Peter and straighten the old man's crooked legs, but I can open the heavy door for him. I can't heal the pain of the divorcee still fighting with her ex over custody, but I can offer her a tissue. Others, and experience, have taught me that the small things matter the most in the end. The little things are like crossing a hot beach barefoot and stepping in a small spot of shade. The tree can't follow you all the way to the water, but it can keep the sand, here and there, just a little bit cool. The moments when the cashier voices her concern over the macabre self-loathing message on my shirt, when the middle-aged man asks if I can manage my heavy suitcase -- those are the moments that pull a person through the rough patches that nobody can overcome for him. I also learned this watching dozens of faces suffuse with gratitude as they yielded to my mother's compassionate authority.

And I still compulsively hate seeing things broken. So when J. straightens up from her bin with a glove and a heavy sock, I flip open my Swiss Army knife, put my hands in their protective coverings, and begin unscrewing the umpire's mask from the closet ceiling, saying, "Sorry. You probably just want to go to sleep, but this is where I'm my mother's daughter."