pan-handling | Dare Boldly

I watch three men, sitting alone at the bar watching the hockey game on TV. They don’t look at anyone. They don’t chat with the bartender. They don’t look at each other. They eat, sip their beer, watch the game on the screen in front of them.

I am witnessing these human stories at a pub where I have joined C.C. for dinner until his buddy arrives to watch what they hoped would be the last game of the Stanley Cup.

“Do you think those men are lonely?” I ask my husband of the 3 men at the bar.

“I don’t know,” he replies.

“In the story I make up about them, they are,” I tell him. “See their rounded shoulders. The way they never look at anyone. The way one sits huddled over his food, one arm on the bar’s counter, swooping out and around his plate as though he’s protecting it. Maybe he came from a large family where people grabbed for food and you had to fight for everything you got.

In the story I am writing about the man at the end of the bar, he feels lost, his marriage is broken down, his kids are grown up and he feels like life is avoiding him just as he avoids it.”

I am always making up stories of people’s lives. C.C. smiles and says nothing.

There was a man at the shelter where I used to work. He was like those men at the bar. Lonely. Depressed. His marriage had fallen apart. His kids were grown, their relationship with their father strained. He’d sit at the bar by his condo every night just to feel human connections around him, even though he did his best to avoid them.

One day, a stranger came in and sat beside him. They struck up a conversation. They became friends. A few days later, the stranger whispered into his ear, “You know. I’ve got something in my car that will make you feel way better than that Scotch you’re drinking.” And the man decided to try it. His friend was giving it to him for free. His friend would never hurt him.

That man had a Masters Degree in Education, worked as a High School Counsellor. And still, his loneliness drove him into taking the risk. It wasn’t long before he lost everything, including all connection with his family. He did gain a criminal record. He carries it with him today along with the scars of that five year period of his life when, at 60 years of age, he was so lost he gave up on fighting for himself and gave into the despair of homelessness.

Today, that man’s story is one of loss and hope. Of sadness and possibility.

Everyday we pass people on the street who have stories we have never heard, yet about whom we make up stories based on what we believe homelessness to be all about.

Drugs. Addiction. Crime. Loss. Abuse. Hopelessness. More crime. More drugs.

Yesterday, as I took a walk at noon, I passed a couple sitting on a concrete barrier lining the sidewalk. They were visibly homeless. Pan-handling for change. A woman in front of me stopped, handed them a bag with two sandwiches. She smiled and said, Enjoy! and walked away.

What’s her story I wondered? Did she buy the sandwiches to give away? Would she have to stop again to get one for herself and her boss or co-worker? Does she have a loved one who is lost to the street and this is her way of giving back, of making a difference.

What is the couple’s story? Where do they sleep at night? What brought them to the street?

What’s the story we tell about panhandling? People are just asking for money so they can buy drugs? Why don’t they get a job instead? What’s their problem?

What if we change that story?

What if every outstretched hand was viewed as being extended for help, not money?

What if we view our role as a response to someone asking for help?

What if the stories we told changed everything? What if instead of despair we read hope. Instead of loss, possibility. Instead of homeless, humanity.

What if we stopped believing the stories we think we know and lean into the stories of our hearts where truth is written beneath the wounds we carry. Where truth is known beneath the fears we believe are real.

What if the stories we tell are the stories of our shared human condition? The stories of what make us one humanity, not separate human beings.

Would you change your story if you could see all humanity as you? Would you write a different ending for a world desperately asking for help?

Namaste.

“Do you give to panhandlers?” one of my co-workers asked as we sat chatting about working in the sector and homelessness and what it means to end it. She is new to the homeless serving sector having come from the management team of a large retailer. She tells me how working at the Foundation has changed her perspective, helped her respond more compassionately, but still, she doesn’t feel comfortable constantly giving money to people on the street.

I never know if I’m doing the right thing, my co-worker said.

And I understand.

I used to give to people on the street who asked for spare change, and stopped. I never felt like I was doing enough. The giving always left me feeling empty. So now, I smile and acknowledge someone’s presence and tell them I don’t have any change, or that I can’t give them any money. But I always acknowledge them. Always let them know, I see you. You are real to me. Not a problem on the street I need to ignore. You are visible.

Several years ago, while teaching a class in self-esteem at the homeless shelter where I used to work, one of the students shared the story of finding himself at the far end of the city with no money to pay for a train ticket back downtown. He’d gone out to the south end in the hopes of getting a job he’d heard about. He hadn’t planned on not getting the job and only got one-way transit fare from the job office at the shelter.

When he got to his destination, the job was already filled and he had no way back downtown. He was stuck.

It would have been easier for me to hold someone up at knife-point and demand their money instead of panhandling for it, he told the class. But I don’t want to go back to jail so I begged.

I had never thought of panhandling as a stay out of jail card but for this 32-year-old man, life had always been about taking what he wanted by force. He’d learned the ropes in foster care and then juvenile detention and then, ‘the big house’ once he’d turned 18. The two years he had just spent not in jail represented the longest single stretch of time he hadn’t been incarcerated since he was 12 and started his relationship with the criminal justice system.

To this man, panhandling was the lesser of two evils. Going back to jail or panhandling to get back to the shelter for the night.

Panhandling stripped him of dignity, he told the class. People either didn’t look at him and pretended he was invisible, or those who did look at him saw him as ‘less than’. Some even called him names, mocked him where he stood, holding his ‘worthlessness’ in empty outstretched hands for all the world to see.

So often we look at panhandling through our eyes of judgement, or getting to choose, ‘is it right to give money or not?’. Seldom do we see it from the perspective of the asker. What does the act of panhandling do to the human being standing with outstretched hands hoping for a handout?

Desperation lead that man to panhandle. Not laziness. Not a need to feed his addiction or a desire to live off the system.

He’d never known true freedom. Never known what it was like to come home from school to sit around the kitchen table doing homework, laughing with his siblings and having a loving parent patiently guide him through the intricacies of life and living cooperatively within the world. He’d never been taught it wasn’t right to steal. He’d only been taught it was the only way to get what he wanted/needed. He’d never been shown how to be ‘a man’. He’d only been shown how life is a battlefield, it’s do or die, take or perish.

And there he was at 32 learning how to live outside the justice system, learning how to get by in a world that was foreign to him. People expected him to ‘know’. But he didn’t. He’d never been taught the ropes of life and never been shown how to navigate it in peace.

Last I heard from him, he had moved on from the shelter. He was living life beyond ‘the big house’. He had his own place. A good job. Friends to share the good times, and to lean on in the bad.

“If you’d told me this would be me,” he wrote in an email he’d sent me to let me know how he was doing, “I’d have told you that you were the one on crack.”

To read more on the subject of panhandling, the Homeless Hub recently shared this article: How should I handle being asked for spare change?