All diners have regular customers. These two sit in the front window every morning and split a breakfast.
He's pushing 70, if he hasn't already gotten there: egg-shaped, bald, bad skin. He walks slowly, stiffly, carefully. She's a little younger, a lot more vigorous.
They're not married. They're friends. They don't live together, but they breakfast together. Every single morning. Drive by the diner at 7 a.m. and you'll see them from your car.
Only this day, not. Someone else sat at the window table; the woman dined alone at a two-top in the back.
"Where's your boyfriend?" someone asked.
"He had to go to work early today," she replied.
"Where does he work?"
"Home Depot," she said. "You know -- the job you're not supposed to need after you retire? But things happen and, you do?" She shook her head.
Things happen. Boy, do they ever.
The other day I stopped for gas at a big self-service station on the West Side. In California, most stations are self-serve. The smiling attendant in uniform is a thing of the past.
I stood by the car and looked around idly as the gas pump robot filled my tank. An old man with long white hair and a long white beard walked up to the trash receptacle at my island and rooted through it. He surfaced with a few recyclable cans and bottles, threw them in a sack, and moved on to another trash receptacle.
The several customers standing by their cars studiously ignored him as he went about his work. When he'd searched all the receptacles, he took them back to his vehicle: a motorized bicycle conversion with a small trailer full of cans. As we all stood there with our cars and debit cards and waited for machines to fuel our cars.
Things happened. I can't imagine what. He was older than I was, and this was his livelihood. Maybe he made bad choices but -- a third-world lifestyle? Here in Paradise by the Beach in the United States of America? You expect this in Asia, in Africa -- not here.
Whatever he did, or was doing, these were not the things that should have happened. I looked in my wallet -- only a couple of twenties. I'm sorry to say I wasn't man enough to give him a twenty.
What things happened -- to me?
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11 comments:
The thing that happened to you is not a bad thing. Will I need it? Will my progeny? How to best use this twenty?
The tragedy is that we are faced with these decisions not how we decide.
The real tragedy is that we have been taught that we have to suppress basic human instincts -- to help a fellow creature in need -- to ensure our survival, and our ability to thrive, under the rules we have now. The system wants us to be less than fully human. It is getting its wish.
It's "the way it is," but not the way it has to be or has been. And it benefits too few people, too much, to be correct in any way. Humans are not cogs to be discarded from the machine because they break, or because the machine has been redesigned to not need so many cogs.
The machine should serve man, not man the machine.
Well said, Boomer.
I had a comment to offer this morning when I first read your blog post, and I ended up not having enough time to post a reply early on.
Time or twenty?
Now, after I have read the comments, I don't know what to say. Thanks in part to you, I stop, pause, and think. The world I thought I knew is being turned upside down.
http://othernatureid.blogspot.com/2011/11/razor-barbed-wire.html
I never before believed that what I wanted was defined by what I do not want. It's sad.
Not too long ago I wrote about a young homeless man "living" in Soquel. I stopped and asked him what he wanted from the store and he gave me some choices, nearly a menu of sorts. I thought it was pretty funny. I spent maybe $15.00 on him. I usually buy food, actually taking the person to Taco Bell if they are in the Safeway parking lot, asking for money. I want to know where my money is going when it goes. I like that your guy was so resourceful. My homeless guy was sitting on a curb. I don't see him around anymore.
I liked this post. It makes me sad but it's real and it's reality.
Thank you, Marta.
Katie, if I stimulate thought in any way, I'm glad. Time, or twenty? In a way, economically, I'm a slave -- it was the middle of the day and I had to be return my cube before long or face the wrath of -- somebody. My place of work is powered by impending doom. A twenty would have been easier to give than time; and I didn't give it. BTW, there are online stores that sell dinnerware -- plates, bowls, etc. -- with a barbed-wire pattern around the rim. Go figure.
Janelle, I did read that post on your blog though I didn't comment. You've always been very unhesitant in helping people, and I admire that.
Now I'm sad, Boomer. What HAS happened to people in our country? And how will it play out?
We have people who stand on regular corners in a near-by town. But they all drink Starbucks and smoke. Sometimes it's hard to tell the ones who are "playing the system" from those who are being ground down by the system.
I guess I thought Santa Cruz was a reasonably affluent community.
Maybe people are like rabbits. Knowing that you can't save them all, you do your best to take care of the ones you can.
This seems like a good time to be older; to have lived when you could swap a degree for a good job. Then you worked and saved and hoped for the best.
I can't remember if my parents said "this is a good time to be old." They lived through the Depression when my mom used their last quarter to make a stew while my dad hunted down a job.
They didn't fare all that well in the end, after a lifetime of labor; living their last years in one of those Secton 8 places.
Is it perhaps all the same story? And we're just reading it with a different set of eyes?
Yesterday I gave my mailman a hundred for Christmas, third time in 20 years.
When I'm flush, I share. When I'm tight, its for a reason.
I retired on July 1, 2011, maybe I'm just trying to gather good karma
LOS, it is completely hard to tell many of those in trouble from those who aren't. Often they don't want you to know. I don't know how things will play out, but I hope.
Santa Cruz has a lot of reasonably affluent people in it, but wages are very low compared to housing prices and rent. Many of our affluent work in Silicon Valley and commute. Many who work in Santa Cruz proper, struggle to get by. Every town needs cooks and plumbers and clerks, and roofers and nurses and teachers, and we have them; but they don't have much cash left at the end of the month.
Anonymous, I've done something like that once or twice. Sometimes when you have good fortune, you feel that you _must_ share, that it'd be unnatural not to.
I have a tree that needs to be felled. I do not have the time to do it, but I have a chainsaw, gas and a homeowners policy that will cover a lawsuit.
I get out of the house to shop every Thursday and see several folks on the same corners of our town. They all have signs that say "will work for food" But, when I offer the job, use of my tools and a ride back to where ever they call home I have been refused. Go figure.
Sadly, Forrest, very few who hold "will work for food" signs are 1) willing to work or 2) seeking money for food. It's just a scam; they're trying to convince you that they're desperate and needy. Whoever came up with the phrase should have got a copyright, because I've seen it ten thousand times in many locations.
At best the "will work for food folks" are drifters who want a little pocket money so they can keep drifting; at worst, the money goes right to the liquor store or drug dealer.
Santa Cruz is a station on the way for drifters and backpackers. They panhandle because it's easy. The truly desperate are not out on the street telling you how desperate they are; if truly desperate people are on the street at all, they're scrounging for cans or bottles or hitting up businessmen and the social service agencies for odd jobs and a roof over their heads. I see people like that. They don't hold signs.
You'll note that nobody I wrote about was asking anybody else for money. If they had, I wouldn't have felt impelled to write about this at all. Same old, same old. But the really deserving don't beg to strangers with signs. In my experience.
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