Do you give to panhandlers?

[Hekate]

37. One winter season there were an assortment of families who hung out outside Trader Joe's ...

I started to feel pretty awful, because how hard up do you have to be in every sense to put your children through that? Yet as a woman I have a lifetime’s caution about opening my purse and wallet in public.

So after due consideration I went back the next week and bought a stack of $5 gift cards along with my groceries. I gave $5 to some and $10 (2 cards) to others over the next few months. If they wanted food (as they implied they did) they could walk into TJ’s and get something wholesome for the kids. I decided I could afford it and it wasn’t for me to judge — but this way they were at least being pipelined into a grocery store.

After January they were gone. I hope life improved.

They were all Latino, which is very common in California, but these were short people and Americans tend to be taller. I wondered how far they had traveled and if they had come on some recruiter’s promise of jobs (which is also pretty common).

As for other people — sometimes I’ve been lured by sweet music and an open guitar case into tossing in a buck from my pocket. Musicians smile back.

The only time that went bad was an evening where a woman and a couple of men had an open guitar case and explicitly said they were trying to get enough for a room for the night. On impulse I tossed in a dollar from my pocket (thinking of course that they were not asking me to fund the whole cost) Kept walking toward my car with my groceries only to hear the woman scream at me about my cheapness. These were white people, fellow Americans who clearly had expectations, and I had failed to meet them.

Stopped at the gas station where a big pickup truck appeared to be stranded, and a young woman was nudged out of the cab to tell me the sad story of not having enough gas to get out of town. I could see her boyfriend at the steering wheel, and he did look bummed. I went back inside the store and pointed them out to the proprietor at the counter. Handed him cash, pointed to the pump and to them, went back outside and told the young woman to pump the specified amount, then went on my way. Again, I’ve always wondered where they came from and where they were going. If you live locally, you don’t generally talk like that — you have a specific destination in the short range, ie under 20 miles round trip, but you know that other towns in the county are 30 - 50 miles away, and Los Angeles is 100 miles off. Hopefully a few other people gave them enough more to make it down the road…