Spare Change

 There have been many times in my life when someone has asked me for money.

I'm sure that most of you can relate to this. Our society revolves around it.

People make it, borrow it, give it back, steal it, donate it, save it, spend it, etc.

This summer I have frequented NYC approximately one day a week for work. I am an intern at Scholastic Inc. and their headquarters are located in SoHo - my favorite district in the city.

One day in June I was purchasing a bus ticket at Penn Station. An elderly man purchasing his ticket next to me seemed to be having some sort of trouble, but I paid no mind. He turned to me and asked if I had a dollar to spare. I looked into my wallet and happened to have a single. I could have lied and told him no, but he seemed in genuine distress and it was just a dollar. I handed it to him and if you saw the look of gratitude on his face you would think I handed him a hundred dollar bill.

This seems to be a reoccuring theme these days.

Earlier this week I went to the mall to have dinner with my little. As I was searching for a parking spot I noticed a woman wandering around. Initially annoyed because she was in the center of my lane, I drove around her and found a spot. I was walking over to the mall when that same woman stopped me. She was your average white, middle-aged woman, but she looked absolutely miserable. It was a hot and humid Jersey day which was certainly clear by the beads of sweat above her lip and her frizzy hair. She looked as though she had been traveling around a desert for a few hours. She asked if I had 15 cents to spare because she was 15 cents short of taking the bus home.

As I was handing her a quarter, a car with two teenage boys sped by and tossed some change out of the window. Tears filled the woman's eyes and she explained that just before she asked me for change she had asked them and they said they didn't have any.

I'm not sure what her story was. Maybe she lost her wallet that day. Can't be sure why the elderly man didn't have that one extra dollar he needed. Neither of those people looked homeless or particularly poor by any means. Whatever - life happens.

I am not saying that I'm your next Mother Theresa. All I'm saying is that in the big scheme of things, I have a dollar and 15 cents to spare for someone clearly in need of it.

We are all equally human trying to get by in one world that all of us share.
Why not help each other out? It's not like the woman asked me to pay her mortgage or put her child through college. The elderly man didn't ask for me to pay for a trip around the world for his leisure.

Call me naïve, but I like to believe that good people exist. So if you're thinking of doing something nice for someone, do it.

As my boy Ghandi once said, "be the change you wish to see in the world."