LESSON FIFTEEN

Objective

Charity Begins at Home


Example


Once again I have an itinerary in my head, so I round up the tribe and march them through the obligatory fun stops. I am not completely reverting to Momhood though, because the scheduling revolves around the promise of free food and drinks in the hotel restaurant...a marketing ploy that I am 100% for.

We blow some quarters in the advertised "game room",(A claw machine and a racing video crammed next to the wash machines in the laundry) and then jump in the pool for 42 minutes of swimming before our appointment with h'orderves. Baby Oliver floats around enamored by this larger bathtub, his Sponge Bob trunks billowing around him. (He selects his clothing based on the size of the cartoon eyeballs printed on them.)
We play Octopus..a family favorite that can be adapted to pools, trampolines, and darkened bedrooms, where I make a sound something like blablbalblablbuloblo and wave my arms around trying to catch them when they come near me. The teenagers play Marco Polo until they realize they must be stupid and they began to float coolly around.
Times up we're out ! We go after lots of threats and sneaky returns to the water. I am morphing back into a mother, I can feel the pull of the moon. The hair is retracting, my face reverting to a pinched and harried expression, my voice raising several octaves.

We march through the shower and come out dressed for the evening. Downstairs we snarf mini hot dogs and nachos and watch the college kids do a mating dance to kill time before the Cardinals game.
We find an electronic hockey game which stays on until you make a goal, so the middle kids are at it for a good forty five minutes and I am able to sip a weak but blessedly free cocktail.
Now it feels like a vacation.

We head out into downtown looking for adventure.
I love St Louis. It's one of my favorite cities on earth. Just grimy enough to indicate it's advanced age but not as sooty and dank as London or New York. It's friendlier, but just enough so that you feel tolerated as opposed to threatened. It's full of hardworking long term citizens and lacks the frippery and oddness of a Western city but still offers the amenities.
And for some reason St Louis loves children. It is not catering to them in a capitalist sort of way..it is inviting them, wrapping it's arms around them. St Louis offers the end of the jump rope to a parent and invites the kids to play.

There are almost no safety rails or warning signs, unlike California, and so a parent has to be just that...a parent...but it's a place to Let Go and Play, to sip a latte while your child teeters high above the earth in a school bus plunked on a roof, or strolls the river banks, or runs through a fountain, or climbs a giant turtle.

And like any city it has vagrants.

The first one finds us on Laclede's landing, tracks us down the street, offer us his sob story, and asks for money for food.
I am blinking in astonishment.
I am standing here alone with fifteen million kids and no wedding ring and this guy wants my money.
He is not an observant sales man.
I tell him my sob story and he is unmoved, he just wants cash.
Fallon's best friend is persuaded in the way of teenagers and gives him two bucks. I feel only a bit guilty...I wish I had a peanut butter sandwich to give him, that way if he really is hungry he can eat. But I march away, worried that I am giving the children the wrong message.
I try to explain that he is a young healthy man, that he has no business pestering a mother and children for money. That he could work more easily than I...that we only have about forty bucks for this trip that blahblahblah.

I wonder what a dad would have done. Would he have given the guy a buck? Told him to go jump in a lake? Would that man even have asked a dad for money?

We go looking for gelato and as we spend fifteen dollars for five scoops of ice cream I question my motives again. I am still worried about the man at the landing and feeling guilty for eating posh dessert. My children are selfish, it is the nature of children. They happily eat and ask for more. They do not care that someone else is hungry anywhere.

I reassure myself that I give to charity and volunteer often where I know there is really a need. I am still arguing with myself when we walk back to the car in a dark side street and a man barrels out from the bus stop waving his arms and shouts "What's happenin'?!"
The teens squeak an answer and jump into the car.
He's still coming shouting "What's happenin?!"
I stuff the little kids into the van and start buckling them in like an idiot, trying to stay calm and plot a course to the driver's side.
He's still saying it "What's happenin'? What's happenin?" His arms waving wildly in the dark.
I want inexplicably to yell "What's happenin'" back at him and make the octopus noise blaoblaboblboublbllo.
Inside the safety of my car I am begining to get angry. I am not going to stand for this. He is still yelling, out of his mind with "what's happenin's"
"I'll tell you what's happenin'!" I shout unheard by anyone but the children. "I am going to mess you up! I am a bad ass mother!" I shout "And I am going to eff you up with my flip flop...don't you doubt it... I will beat your ass with my flip flop..I will mess you up!"

And that's when we come around the corner into the light and see that he is crippled, held in place by bad legs and a crutch, his voice the only thing he can send our way. The teens are in hysterics laughing and the children are bewildered...and I am abashed and confused.
I have yelled at a crazy cripple.
That is the extent of my bravery. I have denied one man a dollar and taken out my wild oats on a cripple.

My suggestion is that you fork over a dollar or two. It is much less than you will exact from your own conscience if you don't.

Homework

Really explain things to your children. Help them understand what charity really is, and where it is best applied.

Extra Credit

Put your money where your mouth is. Don't yell at cripples.