Just A Dab'll Do...

I'm not really good at cliches.

I blame the English professor my first year of community college. He took one glance at my writing - once highly regarded by the teachers in my small-town high school, where I took high honors courses and finished my entire high school curriculum by the time I completed my junior year - and declared that I wouldn't have an ounce of substance in my essay if it weren't for the cliches.

(I'm not sure what the hell his problem was. For a writing professor, he was a creative nobody with a serious case of self importance. Which was totally ironic.)

Anyway... I try not to use cliches. (I still use them constantly, but I try not to.)

But today, one sprang readily to mind as I was accosted on the street for money.

"You'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."

My Fair City is full of people who've fallen on hard times. The sidewalks are cluttered with the styrofoam cups that the local soup kitchen uses to dole out morning coffee. Street corners are jam-packed with panhandlers, each trying to make their living with their cardboard signs. Some are cliched ("Homeless Vet, please help, God bless..."), some are less so ("Not homeless, just a daddy trying to make ends meet...") and some are the judgemental crap that you expect ("God is watching."). They're all there. Sometimes even competing on the same corners. It's a mess.

After their shift during the morning commute and their stop at the food pantry, the huddled masses are left to stroll the streets until people start coming outside for lunch.

And today being a balmy day here in the Frozen North, they were out in droves.

I watched a few picking through trash cans as I walked to the local soupery for my lunch.

I saw a couple hanging out at a corner, fighting misery by making company.

But one woman was trolling.

These are the individuals who walk up to passersby and request assistance.

Now I have my little rant that I launch into when I think about homelessness. Product of a broken system, where's the real help when you need it, blah-blah-blah. I won't bore you with that here.

The point is, I'm not thriving myself. I'm scraping by. Boyfriend of Amazingness and I have our little system that keeps us afloat without anyone sinking into the abyss of financial despair, but there isn't a whole lot to smear around for anything else. A couple bucks to the food pantry, some dollars to a local kids group... but not much.

So when I'm faced with situations like this, I'm not typically able to help.

In fact, most of the time I don't even have cash. I just have my little debit card with a few bucks to get me by.

Which means that, when I'm accosted, the best I can do is tell the truth:

"I'm sorry honey. I don't have anything."

Today was just like that.

The Troller walked up to me, hand brazenly outstretched as she said "You got anything for me?" I squared my shoulders as proudly as I could, feeling like spineless scum**1 as I said "I'm sorry, honey. I don't ha..."

It was at this point when the woman jutted her hand forward more firmly and interrupted me with a beligerent "I'm hungry."

And she said it with a glare.

The woman was trying to bully me into financial assistance.

It was so much easier to walk away, knowing that she couldn't catch this particular fly with the vinegar she was putting out there. I still hope she found her lunch... but she wasn't going to get it that way. Not from me.

**1 One of the difficulties of trying to be a kindhearted person is that you cannot always be kind. Sometimes you have to be selfish, or you'll end up spending your lunch money on someone else's lunch, and then you'll go home hungry. You cannot help others before you help yourself.