Triple Heartbreak: NY Beggars, Yoshoo, and Rotten Apples in Moscow

         Like a lot of people, I have cried many times in my life, about important things and not so important things. Three times rise to the top in recollection not only because they are recent, but they help to define who I am, who I try to be, and life itself for me.

         The first I will mention was 7 years ago. I was in New York City, I was illegally parked, and put in what I consider, the most shameful position imaginable to my self-image. I was walking down the street, just passed someone asking for help, and was relieved I did not have to turn around as it was not expected of me, and no one else was helping either. I fit in too well there. I knew exactly at that moment I would never get those words out of my head spoken by a child to my back almost inaudible on a noisy street which would echo in my head for the rest of my life, “Please sir, could you....” and then trailing off when seeing I was not going to turn around.

         To put it a bit more in perspective, I have always tried never to turn my back on anyone asking for help or even for money. I prided myself on always hearing out anyone, and whenever I could, giving as much help as they asked or that I could. I even went without a meal once while in college when extremely hungry because as I was going to get food, someone outside was panhandling and gave him the only few dollars I had because though I was broke, unlike him, I knew I would be able to find something to eat when I went home that night, plus I had a home then to go home to as well.

         New York City is a very strange environment to me: too many people, too much going on at once. I have never cared for the place and find it abrasive somehow. Since I was saving up to move to Hawaii, I had for some reason over $1000 on me in hundred dollar bills which made me nervous of being robbed or pick-pocketed. I was in a ritzy area of the city where I thought such things might occur. I was not able to find a place to park but figured I could get away with parking in a tow-away zone because I did not think I would be long and guessed, correctly, that my car would not be towed, though I really had nothing to base that on.

         I am often able to read situations correctly, and because of this, make mistakes when I think I know what is going on or going to happen before they actually happen. This day I was blindsided completely, and it was due to anger and an instant judgment which could have been wrong. I was on Wall Street, and saw what I thought was a person using a child to beg for money. The child was dressed in what seemingly purposely looked like rags with mismatched socks and shoes which did not fit, clothes soiled or torn, and the woman seemingly begging for money, whom everyone ignored both of them completely.

         Thinking I knew the situation, I was enraged. “That child should be in school. Its the middle of the day. How can someone be dressed like that and to be used to get handouts? (It was not just bad clothes but seemingly far worse than could be imagined, seemingly almost having to be for effect.)This is America. This should not be happening here. This should not be happening at all.” Obviously, I am not used to cities or seeing what goes on there, and most other people there seemingly did not notice them or ignored the two people completely, as if it was not anything out of place at all.

         So when walking past, thinking I knew completely the situation, I was relieved because I was so angry that once I had gotten past them, the way I saw it, pretending I did not hear or see them, that I could just keep walking. But I was not to get off so easy. Just after I made it past them the child had turned to me and said to my back, “Please sir, could you...,” and yes, I was relieved at that instant that I lived in a society that said, “you don't have to turn around, you can just keep walking and pretend that person does not exist.” It was so antithetical to everything that had been my life and everything I hoped my life to be.

         I was immediately thrown into turmoil by it. I did not see that coming. I was too distracted by the crush of people all around me, the bustle, the voices, the thought of being robbed, too angry at what I thought was the situation, and worrying about my illegally parked car possibly being towed. My mind reeling, I quickly put together a new set of plans. I would go back to where my car had been parked, check to be sure that it was not being towed, and then I would go back to what I thought were people begging and try to find out what the situation there was.

         If it was a good story, or if they needed to find something or get somewhere, I would try to help as much as I could. I would have at that point even gladly give hundreds of dollars if I had to just to paper over that I had just been relieved to have not been required to help someone who very much may have needed it and that moment, me walking away from someone asking for help, would not be frozen in time for all time. I would undo it no matter how much it cost me.

         I got back to where my car was, a nice new sports car, and saw it was still there. But then I was approached by yet another presumed mother and daughter standing by my car, and when they saw that it was mine, this time there was no doubt in my mind about it, that as they were approaching me, that they were begging for money. That time it was clear. Now I was really pissed off. “What is with this place? I can't take this. Get me the hell out of here!” So instead of going back, I got in my car and drove off.

         That night, I not only cried, I literally prayed to die. I could not believe I could be so completely caught off-guard, then so completely 100% time-blind, and to have walked away from a situation I might have been of help when asked directly simply to be listened to, and not even giving that much. There was nothing in that incident that was, relative to the rest of society, anything to be particularly ashamed of, and if I lived in New York or any other major city, I might have had to learn to deal with things like that happening everyday, and might quickly tune it out or like others, have good reason to think I knew the situation based on similar experiences with others. But it was not how I ever saw myself. It was unthinkable. If I could be that much caught off-guard, that much blind to something about to happen, and react that coldly, that out of character, then how might I handle the much more difficult things I knew life would throw at me, without potentially becoming even colder and more unfeeling? "I can't do it. I won't be able to do it. I would fail."

         But I had a realization then that night, that it was really by choice. I lived because I chose to do or attempt certain things, that it was in part, my will that I should be at all, to live by rules I chose for myself to live by, sometimes or in some ways, confining and difficult for me to follow. I could quit at anytime, not meaning suicide, but that every course that I followed and would attempt later, was ultimately by choice. I had no ones image to live up to, and my own was optional, chosen, willed.

         That realization, not the first time in my life I had thought about it in those terms, gave me strength again. At that point, knowing myself to be more or even completely fallible, gutted, I also realized, being who I am is first and foremost my choice, and what others expect from me, whether more or less than what I expect from myself, is secondary. It is true that I would expect no others to have to live by the rules I set for myself. I will never cut myself as much slack as I do for others, but that too is only by choice, and is rescindable.

         The second incident I choose to mention was more recent, in early 2004. It was after the car accident, and as I said in other things, my mind was rebuilding itself after a serious concussion a few months earlier that caused significant damage. I was distraught, trying to figure out as much about life as I could, and as I also said in other things, trying to figure out how everything in life and the Universe fits together, my life, everyones lives, everything. And I gave myself a deadline for having to learn absolutely everything about absolutely everything, or at least everything about what life is or is about, and I knew I was not going to make it before that time. I might die without knowing what life was about, for then I was still trying to work that out again, and that thought chilled me and broke me.


         When realizing I could not know everything that I wanted to know, at least at that time, not being able to figure out everything, I told myself to remember the Yoshoe and Yoshoemee story. And then it popped into my head. At first it did not cheer me up, but then, eventually, slowly, still with a wet face from crying, I wrote it down. It worked more or less. To me, that is what that story is, a consolation prize for not being able to know everything about everything, or even everything about what concerns my life that I think I ought to know about or should be able to figure out. Yet it was something within me, something I could pull out when needed which cuts right through to the heart of everything else, and it was there to give me comfort when I also thought I could not bear to go on, but needed to and did.

         The third time I will mention happened a few months before that. It relates to the other two in various ways. What set me on the course for thinking I needed to know Everything about Everything was that there was a place I saw on TV that I knew, also mentioned before, Kolomenskoe, a park in Moscow. Once I knew that place existed, and that I knew it in another sense, I thought if I went there, I would be able to figure out how or why, or at least what going there would mean. To do that, I saw it if not taking the world in an entirely different direction, it threatened to change my life completely into something else. It was a branch or wing onto my life that was unfamiliar and almost unthinkable, yet it also needed to be understood.

         I did not get really any grand realization by being there, though it was confirmation that I was familiar with that park somehow. But what happened after that was curious and crushing when combined with it and the place in general. While waiting for my shuttle, I went by an old lady sitting in the freezing rain with a puppet on her hands that lit up. It was probably the most heartbreaking sight I ever saw. A woman of 80 or older selling apples slightly rotten with this puppet on her hand trying to get people to notice her. Normally, I think it my place to help anyone life puts in my path, but felt I was on the wrong path, and it was not my place to “interfere” with things there. That feeling of being on the wrong path, not really the wrong path but too off-center to any longer get definite bearings, has now spread so that many more things I now think are wrong for me to “interfere” with, even to the point sometimes of everywhere and everything no longer being my place. I just seem out of sync with the world sometimes, and at that point in time, I felt more “not belonging” there or least “ought not” to affect anything happening there than anywhere else I had been in my life up until that time.

         I ran though every possible way to try to help that old woman and could not find a way that I did not think it would backfire. That is how I see it sometimes. To break the “rules” of what is “interfering” means risking throwing someone else's life off in a direction possibly negative. In this case, giving money to her might put her at risk for being beaten and robbed. As much as I saw this at the time as a bad idea, breaking the rules, I could not not try to help her. She was not my grandmother, but she could have been someones. I ran through every possible thing I could do until I found one that I thought could have worked without backfiring.

         I would buy an apple and hand her a crunched up bill that she would pocket soon after. I really did not have much money to spare as I was almost broke but I was leaving soon anyway and that much money would not have helped me out of the bind I was in anyway. I decided to try to give her 500 rubles, about $17, and figured that might have helped her a bit. But that is a lot of money in some places. At first, everything happened exactly as I had hoped it would. I was proud. Then it started coming apart.

         She began to think that I had made a mistake. After she sat fretting for a few minutes about what to do, I began to pray the van would leave. She started to wave to me, came over to the van. Shoo, go away I waved at her. This was what I was most afraid would have happened, and if that van had not been delayed, it might had gone as I had hoped. Then, her realizing that I had meant to give her that much for the apple, she was all, thank you, thank you, bless you. Then she sat down again, tucked the money into her shirt, and after a few minutes decided to call it a night and go home. But the van stayed on and on, and after she left, the van driver who saw the whole thing, and though it was by now long long after the time he was supposed to have left, he decided to take a long walk in the direction she went far down the street and around the same corner.

         Now it could be, and hopefully was, either a coincidence or that the van driver had good reason to take an interest besides thinking that he could shake down an old lady who obviously had just been given money, so much so that she would make a minor scene about it. I tell myself, he may have just questioned her, or maybe that helping her only made a positive difference in her life briefly, and that nothing bad might have happened as a result of my wanting to help her.

         It is hard to say what criteria I use for deciding what is “interfering” and what is not. So much of life is strange to me now, so much past the end of the line, that to do anything at all can seem to me to be to risk the opposite of what I attempt or hope will occur later. But that is life, to do without knowing everything that you will affect nor being able to control everything that follows from what you do. I used to believe “nothing done in good faith can have a lasting negative effect,” but that is just words, old words and an old idea to me now.

         That night I broke down and cried hard. It was a weight almost unbearable. In New York years before, I cried because I was blindsided suddenly without warning and missed a chance to help someone, far worse and more completely than I ever could have imagined being caught off-guard. In Moscow, I cried in part because a well-thought out attempt to help someone that worked exactly as I saw it could have, later than I anticipated slowly unraveled, possibly into exactly why I feared to try to help her, and thought it best that I should not attempt it. That even when someone is standing right before me and that I think I could help, I know I am helpless to help them because of everything else around us both.

         That is a weakness, a part of my circumstances, that is hardest to bear, by choice or not. Knowledge of why this is so is not lacking in me anymore, but it is not always a comfort. Life is always best a friction, a coarseness, meant to make a mark or impression upon you. Without it, without deep feeling, gliding too easily, you are not engaged in it and less a part of it than you can be. How much you should be a part of it, a part of them, a part of their lives, that is your choice.