My burden that morning was a zip-lock bag full of pennies. It weighed a good two or three pounds: a shifting mass of copper and zinc the size of two fists in a skin of clear plastic.
That bag of coins rode around in the back of our car for years â ejected from the house, certainly, but with no other place to go. I had hoped to find one of those convenient supermarket machines that accepts your pennies and offers quarters in exchange (minus a cut). But they had all disappeared.
I could have taken the pennies to a bank â if I'd been willing to wrap them in paper rolls and get them to the bank during business hours. I never got around to it.
So the pennies remained in the back of the car, perpetually in transit like some exile trapped in an airport or embassy because no country will accept him.
That morning I'd dropped the car off for service at Abstruse Motors ("We understand your car, even though you never will"). The garage is near our house, so I'd planned to walk straight home. But I spotted the bag of pennies in the trunk, and had a thought. I scooped up the coins and headed downtown instead.
Soon I was well down Pacific Avenue â the heart of downtown â with several dollars worth of pennies in hand. And all I needed was for someone to approach me and ask:
"Spare change? For food?"
He was twenty years of age or so: slender, with a vague expression, a backpack, and tufty blonde facial hair that would never grow up into a beard.
I held up the bag. "It's full of pennies. Only pennies. Do you still want it?"
"Awesome," he replied. This apparently meant "yes." I passed over the bag, which quickly vanished into his backpack.
He didn't exactly thank me, but I'm not sure that he should have. Was I doing him a favor, or was he doing me one? I don't normally give to panhandlers; I only gave him the pennies because I wanted them out of my life.
Technically, I gave him a gift; but who benefited? He'll have a fairly hard time spending those pennies en masse, unless he simply trades them to some other drifter.
Giving is a knotty subject; I tend to dwell on it around the holidays. What exactly is giving for? What's its function? Why is it a virtue? When is it a virtue? Who really benefits, and how?
We all think that giving is good and moral, always. And then we stop thinking. But we shouldn't.
A couple of days earlier I roamed that same stretch of Pacific with a camera in hand. I'm no great photographer, but if you keep clicking the shutter you're bound to get a good shot eventually. That's my article of faith; that, and a digital camera with a ten-gigabyte memory card
As I orbited through downtown, I found that I did not orbit alone. I crossed paths repeatedly with a group of barely-teenaged girls in dance togs and warm-up jackets. A few boys traveled with them, and adult chaperones. I had not clue what they were up to.
Enlightenment came as the group approached a young, vaguely Rastafarian couple: neo-hippie nomads with dreadlocks, layered peasant clothing, backpacks, and skateboards.
One of the dance girls shyly offered each traveler a plastic bag of toiletries and personal care items: soap, combs, toothpaste, toothbrushes, tissues and such. The travelers accepted them politely, with thanks. A chaperone gave the teenager a hug, and the group moved on. I heard one of the boys ask plaintively, "How come nobody wants to take anything from me?"
And I understood: the kids had come down to Santa Cruz from an upper-class 'burb to practice giving to the less fortunate; later, on the Internet, I tracked their origin by the dance academy logo on their jackets.
They were learning a life lesson, carefully set up (or at least facilitated) by the adults. They had come to Santa Cruz to give to the needy, and to hopefully find satisfaction in the act so they'd continue giving later in life. And that's perfectly fine.
A few seconds after the kids left, an acquaintance of the travelers approached them and proposed trading for their toiletries.
I didn't stick around to see what transpired, but here's the point: you can give people whatever you want, but once it's in their hands, the outcome is out of your control. You can declare that Good Has Been Done and walk away in triumph. But was Good really Done? You gave them what you wanted to give, but was that what they needed to get? Did you give to Do Good, or to feel good about giving?
Here's another example: in the run-up to Christmas at my office, I noticed that a lot of people were under more stress than usual. You heard in it the break room: "I'm dead tired; I've got nothing left," one woman said. "I'm just trying to last until Christmas," another answered.
"Sounds like somebody needs a chocolate intervention," I said, butting in.
"Chocolate is always a good idea," they answered.
Oh, really? I decided to test the proposition. The next day I went to the market and bought an irregular three-pound chunk of dark chocolate. With some effort I bashed it into healthy-sized chunks and laid it out in the break room. It resembled a scale-model mountain range.
Then I sent out an all-hands email and laid a bet with myself on whether the largely female office staff could finish off three pounds of chocolate in an afternoon.
The answer was, not quite; but very, very nearly. And I must say that I've never seen the office so calm.
So I gave; was it a moral victory, or just self-amusement? I made some people happy â and calm â but I'd also hoped to enjoy myself, and did. The next day I brought a two-pound loaf of home-made fruit bread and was the hero of the break room once again; but only because a well meaning friend had given it to my wife Rhumba and me the night before, and we had no interest in eating two pounds of fruit bread all on our own; or, frankly, at all.
When you come right down to it, the decision to give almost always springs from mixed motives. When you give, often you get -- not in some nebulous, soft-lit spiritual sense, but in a very real way. Maybe that's the way it ought to be.
These last few weeks Rhumba has given away bags -- literally -- of knitted goods. Thanks to her quixotic mission to introduce the Austrian Christmas demon Krampus to the children of Santa Cruz – even Santa Claus has a dark side – her work area was overrun with dozens of carefully-knitted, one-of-a-kind Christmas monster toys. But the project was over, and it was time to give them away.
She and I bagged up the Krampus dolls with big "free" stickers and explanatory notes and dropped them all over Santa Cruz on Christmas Eve. Who got them? Who knows? Rhumba believes in trusting to fate; and all her friends are knitters, and already hip-deep in their own work. And maybe a Krampus doll got somewhere that it really needed to go.
The next week, it was knitted hats â the byproduct of a knitting problem she'd been trying to work out. There were close to a dozen. We bagged them and tagged them like the Krampuses, and dropped them here and there downtown where people who neeed warmth might find them. It was cold that week; there was a lot of need.
Is Rhumba an generous, caring person? Yes: but she's also a serious knitting geek who has limited space and doesn't believe in selling her work. Selling just takes time away from knitting, which brings her more satisfaction than money does. Much better to give her projects away to whoever (or to charities, which she also does). And then glory in her temporarily-clear workspace and start another project.
So where does this leave us? In the end, I think giving is a social activity. People naturally give to those around them and those who are part of their "tribe," whatever it may be. And if the gift comes with a little attitude, like my gift of chocolate, that's just humans being humans.
And as humans, we give to confirm each other's importance, to acknowledge that each other's presence makes life better, more pleasant, or sometimes even possible. The members of the knitting club that Rhumba leads all give her small Christmas gifts as thanks for the work she puts in. This year she honored them in return by buying a sheep in their name (for wool, not meat) for a third-world farmer.
At my place of work, where I support difficult and buggy software used by the sales force, the more with-it account execs sometimes drop small gift cards in my direction in thanks for the many times I've sweated buckets to solve their problems. Half the time I don't even spend the cards: it really, truly is the thought that counts. The thought that says, "You're important. I value you. I do not take your work for granted."
A gift of near-useless pennies, on the other hand, is hardly a gift at all. I merely considered it sinful to throw them away; the young man was simply someone to take charge of them for me. If I'd actually cared about him, I'd have given him bills instead. But I didn't. Because it's my experience that panhandlers here seldom say truth â just whatever might get them a donation. So, they use us, and I used him. There was nothing social about this transaction, and I'm not proud of it.
If civilization and spirituality do anything for us, they encourage us to think beyond our circle of friends and acquaintances to the "big tribe" of all humanity. It works to some degree, or some of us wouldn't raise money for destitute people in the community. Or write checks that benefit people we don't know and will never see. Or vote to raise taxes on ourselves for the benefit of the nation as a whole. Rhumba believes utterly in the Big Tribe; she's both religious and a formerly card-carrying socialist, which makes a serious double-whammy. I try to believe as well, as do most of our friends.
Those teen-aged dancers were trying see the Big Tribe: they came downtown to practice giving to needy people who aren't like them. But at the end of the day they returned to their privileged, organized lives of dance, comfort, iPhones, and college prep in a town where ugliness rarely happens â in public. Will the lesson sink in? Was it even properly presented? Time will tell.
It always does. Giving is not just admirable or moral; it's necessary and practical. Giving makes society possible. You give me something, I give you something; your cousin Eddie gives you something that you share with me and your sister Esther who's been very good to you when you needed her. And the government -- which is all of us -- keeps sending the social security checks that keep the old folks afloat so they can volunteer to watch children and man the food banks and the public libraries where Rhumba and I go to borrow books, and, andâ¦
Just give up the idea that you owe nothing to nobody; that you did it all on your own. Lizards think that way; mammals are supposed to do better, and humans best of all. Though if you watch the news, you get the idea that humans have dropped the ball. Even the dolphins are beating us out.
The point is that you give and you get, you pay and are owed. Youl live in a complex web of favors and obligations and gifts and repayments that you will never be free of until the day you die. That web is called society, civilization, the Big Tribe. It makes a good life possible.
And the only thing that can kill it is too many people thinking like lizards: stepping outside the tribe so that they can prey upon it, or even enslave it. Remember, you're a mammal. Give, and take, and owe and lend.
Support your local tribe: and the big one, too. Have a great New Year. And keep an eye out for lizards. Some of them wear very nice suits indeed.