The coded language of needy
When people ask for change, what is it they really want?
You may remember the heartwarming story about the New York City police officer who, on a frigid night in Times Square, used his own money to buy a pair of $100 boots for a barefoot, homeless man who looked marooned on the sidewalk.
A tourist captured the act on video, which went viral, which landed the freshscrubbed copper on CNN and the talk-show circuit just before Christmas. It was magic, a small kindness in a cynical age.
Within days, reporters caught up with the homeless man. He was barefoot again. No boots. And something else: he was not homeless, he lived in an apartment, and had a history of being hard to serve, despite many, many efforts.
Does this change the moral of the story? No. It was never really about the boots.
A photo on the front page of the Citizen last week had us thinking about the motives for giving to needy strangers and, with our daily walk-bys, the tiny morality trials that panhandlers ask us to adjudicate.
Are we bad people if we tuck our heads down and pass by, or idiots for stopping with money? Are we to judge their worthiness by their sign? Their dog? Their demeanour? The level of need by the socks on their hands?
Begging is not a plan. What is it, really, that they want?
Catherine Landry is the woman who stopped to help the panhandler, Chantal Richer, on Rideau Street. It’s something she does often and the media attention, frankly, makes her uncomfortable. “This time, I got caught.”
Landry is well-known in Ottawa’s restaurant and entertainment scene, a veteran in the culture trenches.
She works on brand development and marketing, plans events, has worked in retail, the art scene, fashion, the food scene.
She noticed Richer for the first time last week on the way to the Rideau Centre.
She stopped, asked her how she was doing, why she was on the sidewalk on such a bitterly cold day. The woman replied that she was broke, cold and hungry and didn’t want to “give up her spot” outside The Bay until she had enough money to get to Montreal.
Landry said she went into the shopping mall and, while browsing in the Apple store, decided there was something better to do.
She bought Chantal a pair of gloves and stopped at Tim’s for food and drink: two hot chocolates (one for each hand), a pasta soup and a bagel.
Back on the sidewalk, she helped uncurl Chantal’s cold fingers (covered with a sock), presented the food and gloves, then tucked $30 in her pocket for the bus ticket to Montreal, where she wanted to visit her father. She said she hugged her, told her, with a wink, she’d “kick her ass” if she were still there, freezing, in an hour.
“You have to acknowledge that they have a life and a world,” said Landry.
“You never know what their stories are, but if you’re to judge everybody in the world, you’re really not a human being, you know?”
Landry said she told Chantal “You’re gonna be OK,” though she could hardly know that. “You have to let people know that you see them. You have to let people know that you understand that they are a person.”
We don’t know today whether the $30 was ever used for the bus ticket or if the gloves were worn or lost or sold or traded. But, like the boots in Times Square, it was never really about the gloves, was it?
Landry, who has pondered these deeper questions, knows this, knows the impulse to help is never a bad thing.
“It’s about remembering to stop,” she explained. “If you can’t give them money, at least you have to acknowledge the human being, right?”
To acknowledge. Yes, to admit the existence of something. Can something so obvious be so profound? On a trip to Philadelphia two summers ago, we ran into a panhandler on his cardboard throne outside the hotel parking garage.
“Know the worst thing about sitting here?,” he asked. No, do tell. “You feel like you’re invisible.” All of which to say, it’s more complicated than a coin toss into a hat. The bootless man in New York, after all, wasn’t really asking for boots. The world just thought he was.
Just as the panhandler, in asking for “spare change”, is probably really asking for something else.
“For me personally, it’s ‘There but for the grace of God, go I,’ ” said Landry.
How many of us, she wondered, are a mental breakdown away from losing jobs, spouses and houses, our entire white-picket worlds?
“I think we have to lift our heads up.”