The Value of a Dollar (or "Buddy, Can You Spare Five Bucks?")

a post by Giselle Renarde

Mother's Day, I was coming back from visiting my grandma at the retirement home. As I sat there on the subway, a middle-aged man came around asking for change. So I reached into the pocket of my jacket, pulled out all the money I had in there, and placed it in his hand. I'm not sure how much I gave him. I remember it was 4 coins, and we don't use pennies anymore in Canada, so it could have been as little as 20 cents. Whatever it was, it was all my change.

The guy looked at the money, looked at me, and said, "Is that it?  Don't you have more?"

I burst out laughing.

Every time I tell this story, the person I'm telling is either highly scandalized or highly concerned for my personal safety. I get reactions like "Weren't you scared?" (nope) and "How rude!" (*shrugs*). I thought it was the funniest thing ever. I must have a warped sense of humour, because nobody else gets the joke.

Anyway, when the guy asked "Don't you have more?" I actually reached back into my pocket to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I hadn't.  I told him, "Dude, you've cleaned me out. That's all I got."  Maybe it's my winning smile, but I finally got him to laugh along.

The audacity! You ask a stranger for the money and they have the nerve to give you only...

...only...

...only... what?  How much is too little?

If this had been an isolated incident, it would have stuck with me as a funny story, nothing more. But here's the thing: it happened again.

There's this other man--and if you've taken the subway in Toronto any time in the past 30 years, you're picturing him already--who asked me for change last week.

I've got a special set of feels for this guy, because one time 20 years ago I was really rude to him. I'm a much more empathetic person now than I was back then, so every time I see him, I make sure to give him my change and be extra-extra sweet and lovely. I've never heard his voice. He just comes around to each person on the subway car and puts his hand out until you acknowledge him--whether that means giving him some money or saying no you don't have anything, or even just shaking your head.

So anyway, he came over to me and I gave him all the change I had in my pocket (it was less than a dollar, I'm not sure how much exactly) and every other time we've had this exchange, he's kind of bowed to acknowledge the donation and gone on to the next person.

This time, he looked at the money I'd put in his palm, and he didn't move on.  He looked down at my purse and sort of indicated with his hand that he'd like some wallet-money please. Pocket money wasn't enough.  I told him I was sorry, I'd given all I had (which wasn't strictly true--he was right, there WAS money in my wallet, but like... not a lot! heh).

He still didn't move on.

Awkward.

I'm used to this guy. We've been having these exchanges for years. Decades. The wanting more was... new.

Finally, I said, "Have a good night," and he bowed and went on to the next guy. Maybe I'd forgotten my line?  Maybe he was waiting for the goodnight? No, that's silly.  He wanted more money from me. And I can hardly blame him. The last few times I've watched him make his way through the subway car, I haven't seen even one other person give him anything--not even a word. The rich white lady he'd gone up to before me refused to even acknowledge his existence.  She just kept talking to her husband until he told my old friend to go away.

A couple years ago I was walking along Yonge Street and an older man was standing outside Tim's shaking an empty cup.  I said to him, "Let's see what I've got in my pocket today" and it turned out to be... not a lot.  I was kind of sheepish, like, "Okay... well, this isn't much but you can have it." He told me he appreciated the money, but what he appreciated even more was that I'd stopped and said hello.

I don't expect everyone who asks me for change to take this approach, but I love when it happens--because time is something I have for just about anyone I see on the street.  I probably sound like a huge Pollyanna in this post, but the truth is that I'm a total cynic. I don't trust people. I assume pretty much everything I hear is a lie. But I reached a point, a few years ago, where I decided I didn't care. People were always going to lie and cheat. It's part of human nature. I can choose to be kind regardless. That's not naivete. It's sublime.

Anyway, I'm veering off track.  As usual.

What I really wanted to focus on was... well, exactly what I put in the title of this post: the value of a dollar.  Because I'm coming to realize, more and more, that a dollar is a different animal, depending on who is looking at it.

If I sell a book for $0.99 at Amazon, want to know how much I earn in royalties?  You probably know already.  It's 35 cents.  So when I hand 35 cents off to someone who asks for change, to me, that 35 cents denotes one book, one sale.  It was probably a short story, if I was selling it for $0.99, but regardless.  It has value to me.

Now I'm realizing that, to most of the people in my city, whether they're living on the margins or they're the types who have so much money they won't even acknowledge someone living on the margins, 35 cents is... an insult.  It's not even nothing. It's worse than nothing.

But... but... but... I love my 35 cents.

One time, about 10 years ago, I was at Buskerfest watching this busker who was really entertaining and funny and impressive.  I wanted to give him some pocket money.  When his act was over, before he passed around his hat, he said, "Busking is my profession, so please take that into account when you make your donation. I'll take your paper money, loonies and toonies..." (those are $1 and $2 coins, for anyone who doesn't speak Canadian) "...but if all you've got is small change, keep it in your pocket and I hope things pick up for you."

So I didn't make a donation, even though I really enjoyed his performance, because all I had was small change and he specifically stated that he didn't want any.

But the part about hoping things pick up... I don't think that way. I'm happy with my lot in life. A dollar still means something to me.  I get excited when I find a nickel on the sidewalk. And I like that about myself.

Before I go, I just want to invite everyone over to my place (meaning my Donuts and Desires blog) in September.

I'll be posting FREE EROTICA there every day!

And I won't even pass a hat.  It's yours to enjoy. 

Details here: http://donutsdesires.blogspot.com/2018/08/exciting-news-about-erotica-every-day.html

There's No Place Like Freedom

by Giselle Renarde

Did I tell you my grandmother has moved to a retirement home? It was kind of a big deal.

I'm not entirely sure how the decision was arrived at that my grandmother would move out of her house and into a retirement home. It was such a momentous event. You'd think I'd be able to pinpoint exactly how and why it happened. But I can't. This year has been such a whirlwind of family stuff. It seemed like one day she was living in her house and the next she'd rented a respite room for 6 months. She'd been there 3 days when she signed a lease to move in permanently.

In the beginning, everything was wonderful. Everything was perfect.  My grandmother raved about the food, the care, the accommodations, the activities.

She'd been there less than a week the first time I visited her. Right away, she told me, "I have friends already!"  Which is wonderful. When she lived at the house, she had family, but that's it. Not a friend in the world. I mean that seriously. She relied on her kids for everything, including socializing. She's got a sister who is two years older than she is, and they only speak twice a year. So making friends was a big deal.

All the same, it was clear to me she was seeing this retirement home through rose-coloured glasses. That's fine. She's 87 years old. She's allowed to be excited about something. But she obviously wasn't acknowledging the negatives. It's almost like she'd fallen in love with the place. It was new love.

My sister and I visited my grandmother this weekend. We both had independent and innate feelings that it was very important to see her right away. My mother had mentioned to us that my grandmother's been ill of late, but that's no surprise during a heat wave. I've been sick too. Totally because of the heat.

When we visited, we found a grandmother who was practically a changeling of the one we've always known. My grandma has faced a lot of hardships in her life, but she's always had a positive attitude. The grandma we visited this weekend was the opposite of that person.

Everything was terrible. Everything! The retirement home she'd raved about when she first moved in was a prison to her. She hated it, hated everything about it.

She wanted her freedom. She wanted to go home.

"If I was at home, I could go out in the backyard and sit in the sun. I can't do that here. I'm locked in this one little room. I'm trapped here."

Well, I hate to call bullshit on my own grandmother... so I didn't do it to her face... but I will do it here. Because when we arrived, where did we find her? Locked in her one little room? Nope. We found her out on the accessible front deck overlooking the gardens, basking in the sun, chatting with her friends.

At home, she couldn't have gone out in her backyard if she tried. There are steps to get down into it and she no longer has the mobility to access spaces without ramps.

The freedom she imagines is imaginary freedom.

That's the thing about freedom: a lot of it is in your mind.

Easy for me to say. I can hear and see and walk on my own. I'm not 87 and my body isn't falling apart. My grandmother has been complaining about her physical deterioration for years, and she has every right to her complaints. I'd be complaining too, if I had all her medical conditions.

But there was a subtle difference this weekend, when we saw her. The complaining wasn't good-natured as it used to be. My grandma has always liked to laugh at her foibles. She's always told funny stories about all the inappropriate places she's peed (in my uncle's car, in my aunt's car, at Subway...), but this weekend's story was about waking up in blood and shit. It wasn't a funny story. It wasn't meant to be funny.

She kept saying, "I wish they'd just take me out back and shoot me."

Now, she says stuff like that all the time. The difference was the tone. The despair. The depression--a state I know all too well, but I've never seen it in my spirited grandmother.

In my mind, it's natural that she's dipped into this low. Maybe not usual for her, but it was bound to happen. When she first moved in, she couldn't find a single fault with her new residence. Now she can't find even one bright spot. She'll even out in time. The place isn't perfect, but it's far from terrible.

I just hope she's got that time ahead of her.

This weekend, a family friend's grandson lost his battle with cancer. He died two weeks shy of his sixth birthday. I was just reading his obituary, since the funeral is tomorrow. His parents ask that everyone wear blue instead of black, because that was his favourite colour. OR, if you happen to own a Star Wars T-shirt or Pokemon pyjamas, wear those. "He'd want you to be comfortable."

His parents miss him, obviously, but they insist he's found freedom.

I want my grandma to live forever. I love her. She is my font of wisdom, of stories. Nothing surprises her. There's nothing here she hasn't seen before. But every day that passes brings more pain, and she's lost hope. She's gotten to a point where she doesn't believe there will ever be a day where she feels better than she felt the day before. In her body. In her mind.

But you know what? When my sister and I left, she thanked us for the visit. She said she'd been feeling awful, just awful, and seeing us brightened her day.

I guess we'll have to visit more often. At this stage, it's all we can do.

A Home Is…Where the Heart Is? Where You Hang Your Hat? Or What You’ve Lost.

Sacchi Green

Home can be where you live, or where you came from; a roof over your head, or, most important in the legal sense, a mailing address. Home can be the land that refugees leave behind, or the refuge, if any, they find in a new land. Home can be where you want to be, or a place you can’t stand to go back to. Home can be where you feel you fit in best, like a career soldier who thinks of his army as home, or an ex-soldier who has been through so much that he can’t handle being anywhere but a self-built camp in the woods. In the seventies there were Vietnam veterans camping in the wilderness around the Quabbin Reservoir near where I live, and even now, at least in summer, there are woodlots around the edges of towns and along rivers where some ex-soldiers hang out, on the indistinct border between homelessness and choice. The presence of a large VA hospital nearby may or may not be a draw to this area.

Homelessness has been a human problem for what seems like forever, or at least since our ancestors had any firm concept of “home.” Since the earliest recorded times families and by extension communities were traditionally assumed to be responsible for all their members, and to be cast out required a major breach of law or tradition. Sometimes, even then, there must have been individuals who would rather risk death alone than stay with families who grudged them the support society expected.

When I think about what home means, and homelessness, I’m old- fashioned enough to think of Robert Frost’s poem,  “The Death of the Hired Man,” even though its most well-known line has become a bit of a cliché. An old farm worker returns to the place he’d worked longest and found the most kindness. He’d left that farm one haying time, when he was needed most, lured by an illusion of higher wages. Mary, the farm wife, takes him in when he returns, saying he’s come home to die, but her husband Warren is reluctant. The old man is no kin of theirs, and had abandoned them when they most needed him. He says,

“’Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’”

Mary counters,

“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Homelessness has many facets, many layers, many causes. Having no place to go where they have to take you in is one cause, and so, sometimes, is feeling that being taken in only because they “have to” would be worse than being homeless. Silas, the hired hand, had family he wouldn’t go to. Mary says,

“’Silas is what he is—we wouldn’t mind him—
But just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.
He never did a thing so very bad.
He don’t know why he isn’t quite as good
As anyone. Worthless though he is,
He won’t be made ashamed to please his brother.’”

It’s a stretch to make a comparison, I know, but these days kids kicked out of their homes for being gay, or running away because of abuse, are sometimes homeless because the price of staying home is too high. Denying who they are in order not to “shame” their families, or putting up with abuse, is more than they can bear. With older people who seem to have chosen homelessness even when families might take them in, the reasons are harder to generalize, and mental illness or addiction are often factors, but the line between mental illness and a drive to be independent of the restrictions of family and a settled home is a hard one to draw.

The clearest cause of homelessness is, of course, poverty, and the more economic inequality there is in a society the more poverty and homelessness we see—or try not to see. Now and then, in some places, constructive efforts are made to combat homelessness; Salt Lake City has built groups of very small houses for the homeless and finds that the expense is less than providing emergency services for those without homes. Too many cities, though, are concerned more with pushing the homeless out of sight than helping them. http://www.nationofchange.org/utah-ending-homelessness-giving-people-homes-1390056183

What can be done? More opportunities for employment would help many, but some would still be left behind, without marketable skills, or too old to be attractive to employers who could use their skills. (Warning: A bit of a riff here about age, homelessness, and women. Women, even those without children, are more likely than men to go to shelters, partly because they feel even less safe than men out on their own at night, for good reason. And women are more likely than men to turn to sex work for economic support—there’s certainly a larger market for them—but even that resource depends on youth and attractiveness. Older “bag ladies” might well be raped for entertainment, but they wouldn’t get paid for sex.)

Back to what to do about homelessness. From my perspective, electing politicians who favor job production and infrastructure repair and a “social contract” that includes responsibility for the poor and afflicted over ever-higher corporate profits would be a positive step. On a local level, possibly more successful in non-urban or merely semi-urban areas, towns can get together with groups of individuals to provide help and shelter. Where I live there are active groups in several towns called “survival centers” that offer food and clothing and other kinds of help funded by contributions, and almost but-not-quite-enough shelters run by church and non-church groups. There are also meal-providers like soup kitchens (a major one here is called Manna) and outfits like our local Food Bank that organizes contributions from local chain grocery stores and runs a farm operation as well, supplying food to the soup kitchens and survival centers. We as individuals can support these efforts, even if it doesn’t seem like enough. (Another aside about women; I’ve heard that the greatest lack in contributions of goods to these organizations is tampons and menstrual pads. Desperately poor women can’t afford them, they don’t like to talk about them, and it doesn’t occur to folks to donate them.)

We can give what we can afford to those who ask for help on the streets, even when we can’t be sure what they’ll use it for. (When I owned a store I used to give gloves and scarves in cold weather to those begging in front of my business, and money now and then, but, I admit, sometimes as a bribe to get them to move to another location for while. A couple of the guys really distressed some of my employees by commenting loudly on the girls’ admittedly quite noticeable physical attributes. I also admit with a certain feeling of guilt that I refused to give to a regular street person who smoked cigarettes continually. Who am I to judge what someone needs most? But in this case I did know that she wasn’t exactly homeless.)

I wish I had better answers. I wish someone had better answers.  Giving the homeless small, economical homes as Salt Lake City does seems like one good idea, if it could only catch on, but some would still be left behind. There would still be those, usually men, possibly addicts or PTSD victims, listed in police reports with addresses like “the streets of Northampton” or “the streets of Amherst.” Or like the lesbian couple I knew several years ago who lived through the summer in a tent and came to my store to charge their cell phones. One was clearly disabled and got disability checks, which, as far as I could tell, was what they both lived on, that and what the other, more dominant one, stole. They almost made it into the town’s limited public housing—I put in a good word for them with the chairman of the housing commission—but the deal was blown when the dominant one was caught stealing, and they lit out for Florida. I was glad to hear from the disabled one just this year on Facebook; she has good public housing now in Rhode island, while the other one will be in prison in Florida for a long, long time. I’m not judging the latter—I haven’t walked in her shoes, as they say, and as far as I know she only stole small items like incense sticks from me—but I’m glad to know that at least neither of them will be on the streets right now as a major blizzard bears down on New England.

Which brings me to the point where I don’t stop wondering what we can do about homelessness, but I do turn to battening down the home I’m so lucky to have in preparation for the possibility of being stuck without power or drivable roads for several days in very cold weather. And I count my blessings.