Sandy

By Carolyn Schuk

 

 

I meet Sandy at the off ramp of Highway 280 and Saratoga Ave, as I wait through a red light. She's wearing a blue cap and holding a cardboard sign embellished with flowers and other decorative flourishes, but the words are crossed out.

 

It doesn't matter that I can't read it. I already know what it says. And that launches me into my perennial "homeless person" dilemma.

 

I doubt most people would undertake the Talmudic analysis -- finding enlightenment by seesawing between juxtaposing views – I do in deciding whether to give Sandy a dollar or two. Then again, answers to big moral questions often lie in finding the answers to smaller ones.

 

Whatever the reason Sandy is here, it’s almost certainly not a simple problem – not one my two dollars is likely to solve. So will I be helping or harming?

 

She's pathetically needy and two dollars could make the difference between eating and going hungry. On the other hand, if she spends my two dollars on crystal meth, Thunderbird or some other nectar of the damned, you could say with justification that I'm helping her dig her own grave.

 

The judge in my head finds in Sandy's favor on the grounds that the Bible says nothing about examining other people's motives – they're answerable for them, not me.

 

After all, Jesus said, "Inasmuch as you have done it for the least of these my brothers, you have done it for me." Not, "Inasmuch as you have done it for my brothers who are not junkies, drunks, tweakers, compulsive gamblers, poor money managers or otherwise self-destructive, lazy, immoral, or deficient in prudence or stock market acumen, you have done it for me."

 

By any definition you choose, Sandy is certainly among the "least," so I fish two dollars out of my wallet and roll down the window.

 

Of course, in the spirit of this discourse, you could say that I give two dollars to someone who spends it on a bottle of Thunderbird, I won't have two dollars for someone who needs it to eat. Enough, already! This is America -- I have enough dollar bills to go around, at least for the Sandys of this world.

 

At any rate, Sandy isn't thinking about my motives. She smiles broadly at me and comes over to the car. All her front bottom teeth are missing. My two dollars won’t help that, either.

 

Has she heard about the Emergency Housing Consortium? I ask. Yes, she says. "I stayed there for a few nights but got tired of having all my stuff stolen."

 

She's happy to tell me the red-light digest of her life story.

 

"I’m 49 and I’ve never been homeless. But how can you pay $1,000 in rent when you only have $140 a week? It’s a real crisis in this valley, I’m telling you, with housing.

 

"Even when I had my job at Safeway, my mother had to help me with the rent. My father, he has a house in Mountain View. But he’s got that dementia, you know? And he drinks like a fish. So I'm going to have a house someday. But that has to be split between three of us."

 

The light changes before I can deliver more useless advice. I smile and say that I hope her luck improves. She flashes me a toothless grin and says “God bless you, I’ll be praying for you.”

 

I pray that I don’t see her the next time I’m waiting for the light at this same exit.