Begging the question

I’m not religious and certainly not Catholic, but there was a time when Pope Francis seemed to have a bead on life’s little conundrums. A couple years ago, he solved my niggling worries about giving money to panhandlers who were clearly drug addicts or alcoholics. I’ve always given money, but I often felt conflicted about it. “Help is always right … even if [the beggar] spends it on drinking a glass of wine,” the Pope said. If “a glass of wine is the only happiness he has in life, that’s O.K.”

 So for the past two years, I’ve felt comfortably virtuous as I placed small bills in the hands of begging women. (I have only so much walking-around cash, and there is a limitless supply of outstretched hands in my neighborhood, so I made it a rule of thumb to give only to women, which satisfies an urge to restack the cards—this time in favor of the sex least favored in life.) I took care to look into their eyes, and to place—not drop—the bills, making sure to touch their hands, as the Pope advised. And I reminded myself, as he instructed, to consider that I am “luckier.”

 I have some regulars on my route, including a woman who seems peculiarly well-spoken and, uniquely, has all her teeth. We’ve become friendly-ish. She calls me “sweetie” and “honey,” and chides me gently if I give her only a dollar and thanks me when it’s five. 

 I didn’t question what she was going to spend it on—though she showed no obvious signs of addiction or poverty. That was her business. Mine was just to give.

 All was going well until Other mentioned that he gave money to the same woman. “She seems so healthy,” I said. “I wonder what her story is.” Other knew. She spends it on scratch cards, he told me—those dollar lotteries that no one ever wins. Aargh!

 Now I’m back where I started—giving away small sums every day but feeling conflicted. Scratch cards? Really? Surely that’s not what Pope Francis would condone.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Early days

It's been like the first days of a school year—with clothes that feel starchy and bright, and careful courtesy to and from the teacher.  There are no fingerprints on the walls of our new apartment, and we are fastidious about returning our belongings to their places and sponging up spills and fixing small breakages. We wear bright, somewhat artificial smiles to greet our super and doormen and neighbors. We are nice to the max. It feels a little phony, but we want to start off on the right foot. Or the left foot. Or whatever foot everyone else uses. We want to march in sweet synchrony.  There are moments of euphoria as Other and I remark to each other on the profound silence, which continues to stun us two months after leaving the cacophany of NoHo. I sometimes wonder if anyone else actually lives here, it's so quiet in the wee hours—no 3 a.m. revelers screeching beneath our window, no drunken cell-phone breakups broadcast into our bedroom, no bass beats booming through...
Read more

Like Downton Abbey but different

The appeal of Downton Abbey for most Americans is its quaintness—nostalgia for a bygone world. But for a certain class of New Yorkers, Downton Abbey is aspirational. Perhaps we don't long for footmen and butlers and maids and valets. But doormen and supers? Hell, yes. After living for 35 years in a little bohemian self-managed building, Other and I had finally had enough of flushing boilers and fixing water heaters and shoveling sidewalks and picking up litter. A couple months ago, we left our old Bowery neighborhood and moved to the Upper West Side, where rain is just weather and not a gutter crisis. We expected to have buyer's remorse, known hereabouts as the New York surprise—the discovery that whatever due diligence you did was inadequate and your building turns out to be infested with bed bugs or roaches or black mold or totally insane neighbors or ...  In any case, it hasn't happened—so far. We've seen no vermin. And the neighbors seem sane. There's a ...
Read more

I feel your pain--and everyone else's too

Empathy—everyone thinks it’s so wonderful! I’m often told I’m an empathetic person, as if it’s a compliment. But truthfully, no one realizes how deeply empathetic I am, and what a blight it is. I would trade in my empathy for a good salty vice—gluttony, selfishness, sloth, whatever. According to Merriam-Webster, empathy is “the ability to relate to another person’s pain vicariously, as if one has experienced that pain themselves.” (I’m going to ignore the noun/pronoun--“one”/”themselves”--number disagreement.) The thing is, I experience another’s pain exactly as if it were my own. And therein lies the problem. There is a lot of pain in this world, and some days I think I feel it all: I am stressed out by the predicament of my friend who has an instant to pack a lifetime and a loftful of accumulation into a modest-sized new apartment. I feel her anxiety about whether she can afford the new place. I feel the distraction of my friend whose beloved nonagenarian aunt died leaving her to dis...
Read more