Giving...and those that take

Like every major city in the world, Boston has its share of homeless people and panhandlers. And my heart goes out to them. Sometimes I think, there but for the grace of God. Most of us don’t realize the thin line that exists between sanity and the insane, between the good-hearted and the criminal. I’ve seen that line. I’ve been pretty close to that line. I guess I’ve even crossed that line. So a little compassion comes easy for me.

I’ll reach into my pocket, and whatever I have in my pocket I’ll drop in their cup. Nickels, dimes, quarters, guitar picks. Whatever. This seems to embarrass a particular friend of mine. Or it insults him, I really don’t know. While I’m fishing around in my pocket, he’ll keep walking. And when I catch up he doesn’t comment. He just ignores the whole thing.

Another guy I used to know would lecture me that it was wrong to do it. “They’ll just use it to buy booze,” he’d admonish me. It turns out that at a later date in our lives he judged me just as harshly. Judge, jury, and hangman. I guess I had that one coming. Maybe they’ll buy booze; maybe they won’t. I don’t know about that. I know that what I’m giving them is more than a couple of quarters. For a split second or so I’m giving them some respect, some validation that they actually exist on this planet and that another human being noticed them, even if it is for the briefest of time. I look them in the eye and wish them luck. I don’t know if that’s enough; if it will or can get someone through a day, but it’s all I can do.

I guess we all do the best we can. As much as I’d like to help everyone I come across, I don’t have enough money in my bank account for myself, much less the poor I come in contact with every day. As much as we’d all like to help, we just don’t have it, and if for some twisted reason we decided to try to help someone full bore, we’d find that our resources would be drained pretty quickly and we’d be left with as little as the person we originally tried to help.

There are others who don’t drain us of money, but of our emotional reserves. There are people who are just as empty of emotion and feeling as the homeless are of currency. I’ve had the unlucky fate of having had one or two people like this in my life. They’re hard to spot. They present just like everyone else. But they need so much, so much more than we can possibly give, and when we do give attention or energy or even our love and lives to them we don’t see the balance sheet going in the red like we would in our checkbook. They can take everything we’ve got, and when there’s nothing left to give they discard us as they would an empty bottle by the roadside. And if we ask for something in return, they just give us a blank look, because they don’t know how to give, only how to take. It’s survival for them, pure and simple. A selfishness bred from never having had love or tenderness in their lives, most likely when they were children. They are empty inside, devoid of any sense of self, of themselves, of who they are, so they take our sense of ourselves. It's like emotional identity theft. This borderline behavior is as insidious as a vampire’s, and leaves us for dead, as empty as they are.