Need Spare Change

First, I live Intown and there’s a lot of traffic at my grocery store, getting in and out of the parking lot is often like parking at the stadium on a big game day. You do a lot of waiting. Every five minutes or so, someone cuts in line. There are lots of people on the street walking, using the sidewalks and standing at bus stops. Today, I saw a young kid, maybe in his early 20s, holding up a sign that said “need spare change.” He was tall, bone thin, hobo dirty from head to ragged toe.

I thought a moment—an obvious cause for such a descent for a human being would be drug or alcohol abuse. This kid is simply too young to be standing on a street corner, begging.

There was a ton of spare change in the bottom of my purse, but I didn’t pull over to fish it out. Instead, I pondered him a moment as I waited for the light to change, tried to picture him under different circumstances, on a college campus, healthy and happy (and clean), with lots of friends and every opportunity in the world laid out before him. There are kids his age who do—my 22-year-old son Wolfie, for one.

Instead, there was this very young man looking as if this might be his last act on earth, to hold up this handmade sign.

The things he really needed, of course, were obvious—a bath, medical care (physical and mental, drug maybe), not to mention months of hot meals and I wouldn’t doubt that some measure of human kindness and love wouldn’t improve anyone’s well-being.

I’m sorry I can’t end this post telling you I rescued this kid—I didn’t. But he did something for me, because that haunting despair stayed with me all afternoon and into the evening. I thought about the emotional and physical jolts I’ve had in my life, what choices led me to where I am today. But scanning over all of it, I don’t think I’ve ever reached such a state of complete desolation, never.

I was telling a fairly streetwise friend about the kid, the look on his face. “That could be Wolfie,” he told me, “easily.” He explained further, he’d seen this all too often: A 22-year-old gets kicked out of the house—jobs are very hard to come by, so before long the kid is on the street, gets introduced to crack. A week later, he’s holding up a sign by the grocery store, “need spare change.”

Maybe a more appropriate sign would have been “need spare hope.”