Wife Provides Lesson In Compassion

She stepped into our path as we were walking to the theater. “Excuse me,” she said, and began telling her tale.

I saw just enough to get the profile - shabbily dressed, unkempt, arm around a child who clung to her leg. She said something about missing her ride to the homeless shelter and needing money to catch the bus.

Without conscious thought, I shifted my gaze so that she became transparent as glass, moved smoothly past her and walked on.

“Thank YOU for at least stopping to listen,” I heard her telling somebody behind me. “At least YOU didn’t pretend not to see me.”

Curious, I glanced back to see who had stopped. I was not surprised to discover it was my wife. Curtain time ticked closer, but Marilyn stood there, patiently listening to this woman’s story.

“I didn’t have anything to give her,” she told me, moments later, “but at least I could listen.”

Not for the first time, my wife’s generosity of spirit shamed me.

I was still thinking about that as the lights went down. Still wondering where I got this ability to un-see and un-hear cries for help.

In my own defense, I must say that I’m not a miserly man. Last year, coming home from vacation, we encountered a homeless family whose beat-up old car lost a wheel at highway speed and nearly killed them in the process. I picked them up, went an hour out of the way looking for a shelter, gave them $30 and some food.

You know what the difference was? I SAW their suffering. Verified with my own eyes that their need was real and not a snow job designed to steal my money.

But that woman on the street? For all I know, she was a professional beggar and the child a prop.

Does that sound cynical? Well, I am the child of a cynical America that has been shammed one time too many. I have learned to believe nothing, trust nobody. I have come to fear the Big Con - the idea that many of those you try to help laugh at you behind your back. I’m convinced that’s at least part of the reason Americans have grown hostile toward efforts to help the poor.

Once, in a Los Angeles suburb, I came across a woman crying loudly outside a supermarket. She told me her family was on the verge of being kicked out of their motel room for want of some small amount. I gave her the money.

An hour later, I chanced to return to the market for some forgotten item.

There she stood, still wailing her eyes out.

A few years ago in downtown Miami, an old woman approached with a story of having just been mugged and needing money for the bus ride home to Fort Lauderdale. I gave her a few dollars.

Two weeks later, I saw her in a gas station, telling the same story to somebody else.

Disco diva Donna Summer’s not the only one who “works hard for the money.” And I resent it whenever someone makes my compassion a liability. Better, perhaps, not to have compassion. Better to shut it down, close it up, wall it over, like a back room in a building no one visits anymore.

But … that’s not the man I want to be. The way I vanished that woman disturbed me. It happened on some autonomic level, like breathing. I barely flexed a mental muscle and she was gone.

As if it would have cost me so much to acknowledge that she was there. Is that me, I wondered, sitting in the darkness of the theater? Me, who didn’t even break stride? Me, who willed himself blind? ME?

I still fear the Big Con. But I fear that man I saw in the dark even more.

I needed to know he wasn’t me, so I fished some money out of my pocket as the lights came up, had it ready as we wended our way out into the chill of the evening.

But of course, the streets were dark and quiet. And the woman and child had long since moved on.

xxxx