thoughtfulI don't generally carry any cash with me. It's a combination of factors, the most pressing of which is probably "I am a slightly vacant-looking blonde woman with a real fondness for the sort of trail often featured in classic horror movies." I've never been mugged, and I'd really rather not start any time soon, so I make a point of having as little money on me as possible. It's fun! This does, however, put me at a bit of a disadvantage when people looking for a cup of coffee ask me if I have any change, since "No, for sociological reasons" doesn't make much sense without the context.
Some days, I head straight to the office in the morning. Other days, I stop by the 7-11 near the Montgomery Street BART Station, where I can obtain a Double-Big Gulp of Diet Dr Pepper to get me through the morning. Despite the fact that it's June and should be, I don't know, summer, it was misting lightly, resulting in instant chilly dampness. Peh.
As I walked toward the 7-11, a man sitting on the sidewalk asked, "If you have any change when you come out, could you maybe help me get some breakfast?" He was hugging his dog. It was a good dog, brown and tan and cold-looking, but good. I like dogs.
"I'll see what I can do," I said, and went inside.
About five minutes later, I came out with my soda, a large coffee, a bunch of sugar and creamer packets (I never got the hang of fixing other people's coffees), an egg-on-croissant sandwich, and the biggest cinnamon bun they had, on the theory that he could, I don't know, give whatever he wanted to the dog. As I emerged, a little girl was petting the dog, and he was reassuring her mother that he'd never ask a kid for money just to pet his dog. The kid and her mother left. I walked over.
"I brought you breakfast," I said, and started handing him food.
He was very pleased—who doesn't like food?—and asked my name. I told him. His name was Dave (the dog was Daisy). Smiles all around...and then, as I was turning to head for work, he waved to another homeless gentleman, this one older, thinner, and sitting back against a doorway to stay out of the wet, and asked what was probably the best pair of questions I'll hear all day:
"Hey, you hungry? You want to share my breakfast?"
Sometimes the human race is fundamentally decent, even when it's hungry, damp, and sitting on a San Francisco sidewalk.
It's gonna be a pretty good day.
June 26 2010, 03:47:50 UTC 7 years ago
Little story of my own you may like:
A couple of weeks ago, some young teenagers from a couple of streets away decided it would be fun to take down my washing line - or one end of it - and use it as a giant skipping rope, thereby stripping most of it in the process (it was metal-core). They also bent the metal of my fence. When I caught them, they ran away, and because my short-term memory is horrendous, I couldn't do much about identifying them, just remember where they went. (To add to this little history, I'm disabled and had a very difficult time putting up said washing line in the first place.)
Yesterday, the kids who live in the street that runs at a right angle to my little block of flats came into my building's shared garden - I let them play in it during summer so long as they behave fairly well, since they don't have much in the way of gardens themselves - and put up a new washing line for me. Completely unprompted by me. I think the eldest girl, who's about eight, told her mother what had happened, else I don't know where they'd have got the line from, but it was really lovely of them to do that.
June 28 2010, 15:06:12 UTC 7 years ago
I mean, it sucks that it happened to begin with, but the result? Awesome.