Do You Have A Dollar....?

Many of us have that discount store just a couple of neighborhoods our of our way, that maintains those particular household products we need at just the right price.  I made the periodic pilgrimage over to mine a few days ago.  About twenty minutes away on the train, but worth it every time.  Even in winter slush.

It’s a couple of zip codes south of my own.  I used to live nearer to that province, but since that time it became a little more barren and dangerous.  Even the well-populated urban area I veered into where the store lives is generally more crime-heavy, the socio-economic status is lower, and since I’m not a socio-economist, I’m not going to define anything with the term “ghetto”, since I don’t scientifically know what qualifies as that.  I’d imagine the real-estate brokers representing the area are doing just fine.

But as I dashed into the store, down the aisle, a young man with a charming little bundled-up girl of about six or seven suddenly turned to me, while his daughter studied some coloring book on the shelf, and asked me very politely if I had a dollar to help him and his daughter.  Somewhat unready for this confrontation, I just as politely shrugged and walked away.   But within a moment, I resolved to respond.  I’d furtively whip out a buck and find him before I left.  I did just that, quietly, and said to the fellow….here…if this helps.   He took it graciously, and said back ‘’I appreciate you”.  I nodded silently, and not to be maudlin, I did not respond my thought: “I admire you”.

The display I witnessed was bravery.   Not on the Ron Howard-drama Hollywood trailer level, with the swells of John Williams orchestration and me played by a middle-aged Tom Hanks.  Rather a more silent, grim, black-&-white Frederick Wiseman documentary kind of scene, a very real and undirected depiction.  

Before I cite the solicitor in the story a Grand American Hero (or his endowing one-dollar benefactor, for that matter..), I’ll disclaim the above account with the lack of knowledge I had about that somewhat haggard looking young man with the innocent little girl.  For all I know, the guy could be on the lam from the Feds, crossing state lines with the daughter he kidnapped from the custody of his ex-girlfriend.  The possibilities are endless.  Especially if you watch online documentaries and Netflix crime dramas, which I don’t.  But at the same time, this obviously destitute fellow was not afraid to make his plea within the confines of a busy store, where any creeped-out patron might react by calling security and having this guy hauled off and interrogated by Child Protective Services.  I didn’t.  I respected his plight and responded like a person. Doing so within store confines appeared safe enough.  After the fact, my whole day had me wondering, just what could that one-hundred cents have done for him…? Even in that store you couldn’t get anything for less than a few bucks. Anywhere else the dollar is practically worth less than a bottle cap.  The man must know how to make every single cent work.  I thought I was pretty good with that, but this guy must be one of the experts.

He’d have to be, with a small daughter in tow.  And the fact is, you don’t have to read too many papers today to recognize that the very sort of encounter I faced that morning is actually one talking place in food and discount stores all across America.  You won’t encounter it in the Food Emporium on 86^th off Lexington.  But you very likely might in a Dollar General upstate or anywhere outside the “One Percent” galaxy.  That galaxy is getting smaller, even if some of us less than eligible are relegated to living just a little too close to it.

There are more personal accounts in human interest stories, of moms of all ages shopping with their children, as the kids mull over some cereals in the aisle and the mom quietly approaches the kindest looking stranger for a few dollars help. These are single-mom families with homes and a car, but barely any money to shop, barely any medical coverage or care, and a recurring dice roll over scrounging up the monthly rent or car payment.

If social media and all its sharing force is any kind of indication or adhesive element in this isolated culture of ours, is it possible that a new paradigm in acceptable human interaction could be establishing..?  The Act of Giving.

Of course, many will still define it unpleasantly as the Crime Of Soliciting.  As I see it, it’s a very delicate act, to be cultivated as such.  It’s contingent upon the when and where.  Any sales expert will tell you that.  In an environment like the NYC subway, generally you don’t stand a chance as any kind of a panhandler.  The street, same thing.  Outdoors is just too menacing an environment for that, especially at night. Within the confines of a civilized environment, like a general store or supermarket, it’s a different story. The approach of a young, tired-looking woman nearing tears, with a wagon surrounded by four little ones a yard away bears an entirely different framework, one more sympathetic.  And often one that will yield some wallet or purse help from the solicited.  It doesn’t resolve or cure that mom’s life or her plight.  But it gets her and her children far enough through that day to see the next one.  They’d certainly live anyway. But a direct contribution from Patrons Like You, as the perpetually solicitous PBS would put it, helps that mom and her children live just a little better.  If their day can foreseeably draw to a close just a little bit more as predictably as yours, then you’ve made a difference.

And more people are doing just that.  More bravery, more sympathy.  The dirge of panhandling by some designs is soon to be replaced by the trend of Applied Giving.  Not to some charity can or jar at the counter, but to the direct solicitor, who makes his or her case effectively, to the patron of hoped sympathy, and broadness of mind.  It was the late author Barbara Ehrenreich in her immortal diatribe Nickel and Dimed, who, at story’s end, made the bold suggestion that to move our society into one that turns toward, and not away from one another, is liable to make our world a better place to live in. In fact, it just might be this society’s best shot at remaining one.

 

Noah F.   

 

How Dare You Call Those Prophets 'Beasts'.......

 

1986 was a banner year for a lot of nineteen-year olds.  Not this one. I spent much of it alienated, inside and out.  Probably many shared that experience as well.  I had no concept of “going out with friends and enjoying myself”.  I had no actual friends to go out and do that with.  That’s because I cultivated none.

My ability to even appreciate and enjoy music was eroding as well.  It was difficult. My enjoyment and indulgence in wood-crated used record stores had faded away, mainly because in the Midwood neighborhood to which my mother and I had just migrated from Queens, I’d no sense of the landscape, or knowledge of what was where.  You certainly couldn’t “Google” something unknown back then, and phone books made for an arcane hunt.

Somehow, life became a pronounced, uphill struggle.  And yet nothing about mine seemed to support such frame.  My mother was out of work, on disability payment, as she’d been for probably a decade or more.  I was attending classes at nearby Brooklyn College, but had yet to obtain any part-time work in the neighborhood.  In one’s teen years, the inclination toward part-time employment isn’t always just a matter of scraping up a few bucks, but it’s also in many ways a move toward social engagement, a way of getting to know your new town, make new friends, connect with your peers.  I was a little too disinterested and encumbered for that.  Why and with what I did not know.  That was my problem.

There was an overwhelming fear between my mother and I. You’d have to be Harold Pinter or Eugene O’Neill to understand probably, but that’s what was asphyxiating us.  For one, we could not afford to live in our new flat.  There was some money saved, but a personal medical emergency drained it.  Now we were in many ways stranded.  My mom at age fifty-five had intentions of finally getting up off her duff and back to work in the secretarial pools that she long tolerated and despised.  But a fearful depression kept her down.  We were in much more trouble than even I cared to acknowledge.  It was good preparation for life, whether I knew it or not.

It taught me one very basic postulate.  If you’re not worrying and miserable, you’re doing it wrong.  If you are, you can’t possibly be doing it wrong. This was that all-purpose steel compass that never lies.  I focused on doing as right as I could.  It wasn’t that hard.  I had plenty of practice.

In the middle of everything, I’d noticed parenthetically that music had changed its design.  The melodic sound of what was once known as Rock had given way to the pop-embraced “Rap”, and now the message adopted by that genre was not altogether a friendly one.

Violent uprisings, ones not known to nightly newscasts for more than twenty years in the metropolitan area, were starting to sprout once more. Racial attacks, violence upon authority, distrust and fear of authority were all in the headlines.  Young people weren’t getting busted for holding pot and having long hair anymore.  They were being hauled in for accidently killing each other with rough sex outside preppy bars, white boys with shaved heads chasing down and fatally assaulting young men of color, and in many cases attacking and using firearms against law enforcers.  It was not a peace movement.  Our cities lived in a pronounced age of war, one to rival and perhaps outviolent earlier times of uprisings abroad.

And the popular sound was no deterrent to this.  While some rap artists were in fact composing sonnets of a desperate cry for inner and outer peace, they were drowned out by the more top-gold-selling sounds of hate and destruction.  Anger sells, no two ways about it.  But amidst this dangerous tirade was this riotous little number by these frustrated young fellows about simply wanting to have a good time in a world where grownups won’t let them:

You gotta fight….for your right……to paaaar-taay..!!

For one thing, I never knew “party” was a verb.  I thought it was a gathering with streamers, paper hats and cake.

Turns out, no.  It means “to celebrate….indulge in enjoyment, have a good time, free of despair or worry”.  Is one beyond early childhood capable of such a thing…?  Not since I was nine did I maintain that capacity. 

A good time for me was not the sort of thing shared with more than one human at a time.  A friend in my teen years, an entertaining comic sort whose company I relied upon largely for respite back then would show me a good time, no matter where or when.  My mom and I could almost always enjoy a good late night movie or sitcom together and have some laughs.  But hanging out with friends was alien to me.  How did one “hang out”..?

It would be several years of fear and economic struggle, and perhaps some inner and outer destitution before I’d see some semblance of stable independence in my mid-twenties. I lived and functioned in many ways alone, and was quite silently content.  I lived without the choke of family drama and inter-relationship emotional turbulence, for the most part, at least in my most intimate life, and it was just the Canyon Ranch retreat I needed.   I embraced music and the Arts once more, perhaps now for the first time.   I learned how to stand and walk erect.  It was a rehabilitation that would ultimately, after too many years, see some corrosion and healing, but strength nonetheless.  Two decades of unmindful escape would lead me to awareness, an appreciative relationship for the first time, and something I never thought possible, matrimony.

It was really all part of a life-restructuring design that would require me more than a decade to embrace, comprehend and begin to fully acquiesce to.  The blessing is a daily one, and I’ve no capability to repay such debt.  That, in itself is part of the middle-age struggle.

Then, there’s the other part.  The terrestrial part.  Financial insecurity, the fear of future, the unknown.  All the things us Gen-Xers loved to get existential and gloomy about in 1994 are now the white elephants we cleaned out of our closets at age forty-five for the scary stuff we never even learned how to worry about for real at age fifty-seven.  You would think all that indulged misery back then would have fortified us for this.  But in fact it didn’t.  It was, in fact, our ‘party’. 

Misery was indeed the layer cake.  Whether shared amongst friends or alone in one’s room, it was delectable.  That and a headset full of vintage Neil Young and Ani DeFranco, and you’ve got yourself a late-night good time.  Nearly every night.   Thirty years later, I don’t know what a “good time” is.

Or am I in fact eligible for one..?  Maybe it’s not necessary to qualify.  No one ever defined these things.  Friends tell me it’s now more than ever, in this fearful day and age, to be as grateful and endearing of every peaceful and artful interval you can encounter.  It’s those roses you have to stop and smell on your way to a long day at work, instead of waiting until your day off, when you’re too idle, exhausted and guilt-ridden over your failures to mindfully get out and do so.

Only now, despite life’s expressway of unknown threats and demons, of all the challenges of the collective human race that loom ahead, in contrast to the movie trailer fantasies that entertained our dark-themed twenty-somethinghoods, am I finding liberty in challenging my insecurities just enough daily, to find those spare moments to indulge critically in a level of artful peace, through music, literature, a gym workout, or a quiet walk and momentary conversation with a forest squirrel, a fellow adult faced with his own daily struggles.  No one tells him how important it is to find peace every day.  But somehow, in a way us humans can’t, this fellow knows and practices it every day.

But for us human mammals, the inspirational message is the one put forth by those once-violent visionaries of a prior century.  As a roamed into my nearby gym for my daily rituals, I arrived during “Eighties Hour”, and blaring above were those familiar, once-threatening Beastie Boys intoning the need to fight…for your right….to paaar-taay…! 

And forty years later…?  To someone who never needed to pick up that sword..?  It’s no longer an option.  It’s a fight to be won.  Every day.  Praise for those who can win.

 

Noah F.