The Descent of Man

 I think I can trace the years I've been in the neighborhood by what I was feeling about, or more accurately, how I was treating, the street people. I mean I can give a rough chronology of any given event because those events tied into the way I handled things, which changed over time.

At first, if people hit me up for a couple of bucks, I gave it to them. 

That ended pretty quickly, largely because at the time we were the first house people would come to leaving the shelter and we would get hit up a lot. 

Then I paid people here and there to do odd jobs. My next door neighbors, when I moved in, were a genial but hard-luck group of three guys who held down low paying jobs or no job, and hung out on the corner. They kept an eye on the place for us, and called us once when the tarp blew off the roof in a rain storm.

Another time I rolled up in the morning just after we'd gotten the house painted and one of the guys came up to me and asked "Do you have any enemies?" 

From his evening roost in his car parked in his driveway, he had seen two women pull up in an SUV the night before and throw eggs at my house. 

A glance showed that they were in fact goose eggs, and the mystery was resolved. My ex-wife's best buddy had geese.

The other two guys came to me one day, in need of cash, and offered to mow my lawn for forty bucks. This was kind of on the high end for my relatively small yard, but I felt like the investment of dollars might reap some good will.

They also needed to use my mower.

I came back a few hours later to find they had broken the pull-start cord on the mower before they even got halfway through. They handed me back the mower, complete with a stick tied into the now truncated cord. I gave them the cash. When they asked again weeks later, I declined without comment.

Then there was the guy with the bricks, and the guy with the trash after Mardi Gras, which I've written about before.

I then went through a phase where I'd give food and water, and even clothes if they asked for it.

This however led to Ronald looking for sandwiches three times a day and to Angel turning up on our doorstep looking for something to eat at four in the morning.

Ronald also wore thin when he spurned our peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Not healthy, he said. I did not expect a man who daily drank at least one entire pint of T.W. Samuels whiskey to be so health conscious, but I stood corrected.

About that time his case worker, who I did not before that moment realize even existed, drove by and stopped to tell me that not only did Ronald have access to free meals at the diner, he had groceries in his apartment. It was also news to me that he had an apartment.

Once we learned people could go to the diner and get all the food they wanted, we stopped handing out food as well. 

We turned Ronald loose on a contractor's riding mower one day. Ronald had said he could mow the lawn for five bucks, and the contractor was letting me use his mower. We gave Ronald a brief class on how to work the mower, and started it for him.

The contractor, the painter, and I stood in rapt fascination as Ronald drove the mower the length of the lot, heading for the far corner at the next intersection. Here Ronald would either have to turn right to keep mowing, or drive across the sidewalk and into the street.

With the intensity of fans watching a football player approach the goal line, we watched Ronald. He made the corner and turned right. We cheered. From there his mowing grew erratic, but he would at least not drive off into the traffic. Looking back, I was pretty cavalier about the whole thing, but as I told the contractor who said more or less the same thing, it wasn't my mower.

I would sometimes give Ronald a jacket when it got cold, but he'd lose them in a day or two.

After Ronald died, there wasn't anyone else who was a fixture on the block that wasn't also doing drugs or otherwise sketchy in a way that precluded the sort of thin but durable trust we'd developed with him.

Now I rarely give anything. I don't give out cash, I don't make sandwiches, I don't give away my clothes.