The Art of Spare Compassion

By Caroline Albert

 “Can you please give me part of 40 cents. Can you please give me part of 40 cents. Can you please give me part of 40 cents. Can you please give me part of 40 cents. Can you please give me part of 40 cents…”

A young woman standing in front of the post office on University Way shrilly repeats this one phrase. Her voice sounds like a drill, one of the large drills blasting “the Ave”, a tired street being rebuilt. During construction, the sidewalks are still full of students and shoppers who all ignore her. I am on my way to mail some letters and like everyone else, walk past without looking.

Abrasive and whining, her speech is as obnoxious as a human voice can get. I want to unplug her. She says please, please give me part of forty cents, but without politeness or emotion. I wonder why only part of forty cents, if fifty cents would be asking too much? But when I stop at the mailbox, only in this pause, I hear a covert desperation, like glass shattering. She might crack. “Can you please give me part of 40 cents…” I reach in my purse and give her a dollar bill.

At that moment the drilling stops and tears well up in her eyes. Her skin seems taunt from exposure, her shoulder-length hair a mop. She wears jeans and a jeans jacket. A plain and
tough façade that breaks down upon discovering someone might care. Exuding anguish, she says, “Do you know you are the first person in one hour of my saying this to even recognize my existence. This is the sad state of humanity.” Before I can think of a response, another woman hearing her emotional outburst gives her some change and begins talking to her.

As I walk up the street, my body feels especially weak from an infection following dental work. For one hour of work, I paid my dentist $427. I hardly considered the cost as my parents had just given me several thousand dollars. I had been turning away their offers of money for a long time; my mother sent it anyway. From my parent’s perspective, my simple lifestyle is impoverished; compared with the homeless on this street it is a life of grandeur.

The young woman asks for just part of 40 cents. There is a man who asks for a penny. It is always just some spare change. Yet I debate about parting with money I call my own to strangers on the street. I wonder if even small change might be used to support someone’s addictions. Does my gesture offer assistance or help create dependence? Am I encouraging an aggressiveness threatening to pedestrians, including myself?

My brother once told me it is about how it makes you feel to give or not because a little change doesn’t really change anything. I have a friend who will never give spare change. He owns an apartment building now and has evicted tenants for not paying rent, like happened several times to his own family when he was a child. His mother kept a lock on the refrigerator to ration their limited food supply. Another friend lives in Wallingford where street people are scarce. She carries spare change in a readily accessible pocket whenever she comes to the U-District.

Living in this neighborhood, I pass one or more people asking for spare change each time I walk up the street. Some people haunt the same patch of pavement every day for months, rattling a bit of change in a paper cup or tattered hat. I have come to feel like a pedestrian piggy banker judging which person I choose to help. The man with a “Beer.com” sign has never elicited my sympathetic coins. The decision not to give can be purely arbitrary; I may not feel like stopping just then. With some, it feels safer to keep going. I feel as if I have developed some exterior callousness. Often I just look away.

Not looking seems to provide a protective shield or bubble. There even seems to be etiquette as to how and when it is alright to look. Some do not want to be seen, looking at them arouses anger. I once gazed momentarily at a man who cursed, “Don’t look at me, bitch!” People in the bushes often startle me. It will be the movement of a leaf, muffled voices, the whiff of alcohol or weed. I am particularly careful not to let them know I see. I have noticed blankets, sleeping bags, clothing, food, and cardboard houses camouflaged by branches.

It is not surprising most choose to look away. I find difficult to accept, however, how people can walk by someone lying passed out on the sidewalk and continue on their way as if nothing were unusual. I have witnessed this several times. Each time I went to the nearest phone booth, called 911 and then went on my way, relieved to hear the siren only moments later.

One day, I was waiting at a bus stop when a man slid off the bench and landed unconscious on the ground. He was Native American with tangled long hair and disheveled clothes, apparently a street person. No one did anything. I went to a phone booth and called 911. Making the call, I missed my bus, so this time I was there when the piercing siren pulled up. I watched with the others who previously wouldn’t look, all our eyes nervously witnessed the semi-conscious man being lifted away in a stretcher.

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