$5 Out The Window, For Better or Worse

Pulling off the ramp from I-70 to Emerson Avenue last Saturday I came upon a panhandler at the stoplight. He sat on the guardrail, a cane in one hand, a small sign in the other, hollow cheeks, goatee, and a baseball cap. He looked really, really tired. The sign, made of a piece of jagged corrugated cardboard looked to have been torn from the lid of a box and was scrawled with the words, "Vietnam Vet. Please help."

I rarely give money to panhandlers, have never settled my conflicted feelings about the whole encounter – the similarity to aggressive salespeople and pamphlet carrying evangelists – strangers asking you to do things with money and emotion that for me normally require more careful, private consideration. And there’s the ugliness of being the overfed guy in the shiny car soothing his middle-class guilt by handing money out the car window to poor people. Yet, something made me grab my wallet and a five-dollar bill and roll down my window.

“God bless you, sir," he said.

"Take care of yourself, brother,” I replied.

"I'm trying," he nodded.

The light turned green and I rolled my window up, and rolled away.

My mind tripped through a series of recriminations: I bet he's not a Vietnam vet – how much Jagermeister can you buy with $5? – does he have a meth monkey on his back? – and then I immediately hated myself a little for being so suspicious. We live in a curious cultural time in which we mistrust the poor as if they’re all lazy con artists. The pretty blonde anchors on FOX News spend their days shaming the poor, yet the Bible tells us to love and protect them. If I can ease a man’s suffering, I want to give. But another part of me wonders if my $5 bill is a crutch, added to his cane.

No sooner had I reached the arc of the overpass, I saw a younger man on the opposite ramp on the other side of I-70 with a cane in hand and a milk crate for a seat. He looked frail and tiny against the sprawling, bleak asphalt, interstate backdrop. His sign read, "Gulf War Vet. Lost my job. God Bless." A woman at the stoplight in a black urban assault vehicle was staring ahead awkwardly, pretending not to see the panhandler standing just a couple feet away.

I’ve been that lady before, too.

I was raised in a small Indiana town. I didn't encounter beggars and panhandlers until I did a college semester in London. There was a little bristle-chinned, raggedy-dressed man who tap danced on the corner of Queensway and Moscow Road in my Bayswater neighborhood, his jacket laid open on the sidewalk to catch change tossed by passersby. Sometimes a second elderly man played harmonica while the first guy danced a jig. One night walking home from the pub with beer swirling in my brain I saw the little tap-dancing raggedy-man curled up asleep on the sidewalk against the iron fence of Kensington Gardens Square.

My first week in London I threw change on the jacket each time I passed. But the novelty wore off and I realized if I dropped change in every basket, hat or hankerchief I'd soon be broke. And so I grew callous toward them and they became evermore invisible. Soon this small town Hoosier boy became another jaded big city resident, avoiding eye contact with the panhandlers and the homeless and giving nothing, leaving their care and maintenance to the tourists and social services.

It is so easy to grow callous. It’s all around us. Consider the insistence that folks on welfare be drug tested.

Assuming the poor are all drug addicts is just a taste of the inflated sense of superiority and accomplishment we in the middle class save for them. Nevermind that the early evidence from states that do the tests reveals it costs taxpayers more than it saves and finds few addicts. Critics said of George W. Bush: “He was born on 3^rd base, but thinks he hit a triple.” Folks born in the middle and anointed with its blessings who call for drug testing of welfare recipients remind me of that quote.

If we’re going to test welfare recipients, why not test the wealthy farmers who take farm subsidies? Over 90% of farm subsidies go to large corporate farms. And why don’t we test the professional team owners and athletes whose stadiums are funded by taxpayers?

We clean up the welfare we give the rich by calling it “tax abatements,” and “subsidies,” and, “public/private partnerships,” but it’s taxpayer money being handed to people who haven’t specifically worked for it, assuming it will do good for the community. That’s welfare, for the rich. Had we tested those rich welfare folks, we might have caught Jim Irsay before he got arrested . . . the most recent time, anyway.

Of course, I wouldn’t roll down my window and hand Irsay a $5 bill if his private helicopter landed beside my car on an interstate ramp, but I’ve handed him far, far more than that through the taxes I’ve paid for the stadium his team plays in.

But of course, life is not so simple. We want things to be black and white, right and wrong, good and bad, so it’s all clean & easy to choose: “Opportunities were waiting for me to grab, so why are those poor folks complaining, and taking from me?” But the adult world is not so simple. There’s not a lot of black and white, just a lot of gray, and all of us pretending it’s clear cut so circumstances fit our prejudices.

It is maddening how much gray I see. Wish I didn’t. If I was better at seeing black and white I might give a $5 bill to every panhandler at every exit ramp until I was broke. Or I might harden my heart and see them as scam artists, too lazy to get a real job. Instead, I’m the guy giving out of an urge to relieve suffering, but wondering if I’m really making things better.

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Ode to Cindy or "The Pimp With The Limp"

KEY WEST, MARCH 2015     I took her hand and stiffened my arm so she’d have something solid to lean on. The uneven dock planks presented endless trip hazards for that right leg and foot that drag a little. Cindy had a stroke when she was 35. She’s giving it her all so not to hold up the line of tourists behind us. Once on the boat I get her to a bench, then gather our snorkels, masks, and fins. The boat is full and festive as we head south of the southern most point in America, toward Cuba. The sky is blue, the ocean is beautiful. Several times I watch her as she’s looking out across the water, her short, dark hair fluttering in the breeze off a tanned forehead. Her impassive, intent expression reminds me of our father. Nine miles out we reach the world’s 3^rd largest reef, and anchor. As we don our gear, she smiles at me, “I may be the “pimp with the limp” on land, but in the water, we’re all equal again.”

Somewhere in the buoyancy and rhythm of the waves, the limp is released and she swims easily.

That night we link up with my musician and author friends at The Smoking Tuna to listen to one of my group, guitarist Chris Clifton. While Chris and his 4-piece band rip through several decades of American blues and R & B, we settle at a table with Shari Smith, an author from North Carolina and  singer-songwriter Eric Erdman from Mobile. When Cindy shakes Eric’s hand, the large screen print of a pistol on his t-shirt, a shirt promoting the band The Mulligan Brothers, captures her attention. I suppose a time will come with the image of a gun won't send her mind to dark places, but not yet. Still, she quickly falls into conversation and makes easy friends. Always has. When our group heads toward the Hog’s Breath to hear another group of friends, The Carter Brothers, Cindy is too tired to continue. I put her in a taxi to her hotel.

Three years older than me, Cindy was a best buddy and confidant in my childhood, the one who babied and defended me and included me in her games. We were the youngest two of four kids. When we were small, folks sometimes brushed the bangs off my forehead with the palm of their hand and said, “See? Kurt and Cindy look exactly alike.”  We did.

Once when I was perhaps 12, past the time when a cute, shapely girl of 14 or 15 would still look out for her kid brother, I was being bullied by an older, bigger kid a couple blocks from our house. He had me by the arm, explaining how he was “gonna kick my ass,” when Cindy came down the sidewalk headed home. He’d seen her coming and had time to lower his voice. Cindy flirted with the boy, chatting him up, batting her eyelashes and flipping the hair off her shoulder, enough to distract him. I got home with my “ass” intact.

For the next 43 years she's come to my aid or defense every single time I needed her. Sometimes when I didn’t know I needed her. When she was home from college and I got in a fight over a girl, she dropped what she was doing and spent her evening with me. When I was building furniture to pay for college and she was graduated with her first good-paying job, she hired me to build a bedroom suite. At the publication of my first book, she sent a copy to Oprah, insistent on getting me in Oprah's book club. When my marriage fell apart a few years ago, she was my ready supporter.

Me and Cindy at the Oldest House in Key West

Couple months back, when I posted on Facebook that I was going to Key West for a couple book events and suggested anybody headed that way for spring break look me up, Cindy sent a message saying, “I booked plane tickets and a hotel for Key West. See you there!” I had to laugh. She didn’t ask, “Can I hang out with you for the entire week? She just said, “Done deal. I’m comin.”

Fine with me. The pimp with the limp is always welcome.

Friday the 13^th, fifteen months ago, 6:30 p.m., I was walking into an Italian restaurant in Ft. Wayne when my phone rang. The screen image said it was Cindy, in Florida. I answer and she’s screaming. Her husband had killed himself! She’d come home from work and found him in a chair beside the pool, the gun still in his hand. She was in the driveway, hysterical, waiting for the police.

Sixteen hours later I was at her house, at the place where Jeff had killed himself, cleaning the pool and repairing things that got damaged with Jeff’s friend Phil. The two of us scoured Jeff’s computer, his job search notes, the stack of mail and magazines on the kitchen table, looking for a note, a clue, anything. Our goal was to make the house look completely normal before Cindy returned. If there was something upsetting to find, we were going to find it before she did. I started to pick up the shirt Jeff had laid over a chair before he went out to the pool last night, and the shoes he’d kicked off at the sliding door, but Phil stopped me. “She needs to touch those things,” he whispered. “She needs to start processing what happened here last night. Putting away his stuff is probably a good place to start.”

Phil is a long-haired, motorcycle-riding contractor, and a very smart man.

About 24 hours later, as Cindy and her grown daughter and I were running errands, trying to plan a funeral, we got notice that our father had died, back home in Indiana.

It is 15 months since that tragic weekend, and as I greet people and sign books on the lawn of The Oldest House in Key West, Cindy sits nearby, her body language is easy, relaxed. We talk with a woman who lost her husband just a few weeks earlier. Cindy offers comfort without getting emotional. In that conversation I can see how she’s healed. It’s been a long road, and she’s still on it, but she shares from her loss, commiserates and makes another quick friend.

The next night as I read on stage, surrounded by musicians and other authors, I can see Cindy’s face in the audience, smiling back at me.

Later that night, it’s creeping toward 1:00. We’re at the Hog’s Breath and several drinks into the night. The Carter Brothers are cranking through Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road. Tim Carter is banging on his mandolin, sounding like a guitar being slammed into a church bell. A little group of women have taken to the dance floor. Cindy raises here arms and grooves easily into the crowd. Somewhere in the buoyancy and rhythm of the music her limp is released and she dances without a struggle. She’s found yet another place where we’re all equal again.

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Free-Range Parents Raising Free-Range Kids

Saturday morning I sat in Noble Coffee with my clients, Randy and Kathy, just 4 blocks from the house they’re buying, talking about their plan to become "free-range parents.” They’re trading a vinyl-sided house in a typical suburban subdivision for a 150-year-old home in Old Town Noblesville, a traditional neighborhood with tree-lined streets and easy pedestrian and bike connections to stores, restaurants, parks, and schools.

They're excited at the prospect of their children having more independence. They anticipate letting their 9, 11, and 13-year-old kids walk to Alexander's for ice cream, bike to the Forest Park over the footbridge, or take their overnight friends to breakfast at Rosie’s or the Uptown. But we also acknowledged that giving 9 to 13-year-old children that kind of freedom terrifies most parents today. But do just a little research about what actually threatens kids in modern America and you quickly discover that this fear is utterly irrational.

Utterly!

Randy recalls moving freely around Cincinnati at the age of 10 or 12. Kathy was a farm girl who often rode her bike several miles to hang out with friends. “I was supposed to call and check in with my mom when I got there, but often forgot. I’d be gone all day and my parents seldom worried.” My childhood was the same, I was free-range in my hometown, free to explore downtown stores, catch frogs in the creek and play homerun derby on side streets. Everybody’s parents were free-range parents.

But in a single generation, what was completely normal has become borderline criminal. Recently in Silver Springs Maryland, the parents of 10-year-old Rafi and 6-year-old Dvora Meitiv were found guilty of child neglect for allowing them to walk home from the park. Their case and others have sparked a national debate about a generation of parents who have seemingly bound their children in bubble wrap and sequestered them in homes and gated communities. When I ask parents what they’re afraid of, the almost universal answer is abduction or molestation.

Is that fear well-founded?

The most recent study on the issue found that in a given year, 115 American children were abducted by a stranger. There are more abductions, but most children are abducted by family members, not strangers on the street. In his book The Science of Fear, Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't – and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger, Daniel Gardner found that American children are far more likely to choke to death on food than be abducted. But how many parents worry when their kids are eating? Also in a typical year approximately 3,000 children die in auto accidents.

We don’t let our kids move freely around our community because we’re afraid of abduction? But turns out it’s 26 times more likely they’ll be killed while we’re driving them around in a car. The illusion of safety in having them near confuses the actual threat. And what about our kids being molested? Statistics again show we fear the absolute wrong thing. The person overwhelmingly most likely to molest our kids are soccer coaches, piano teachers, youth pastors, and . . . uncle Joe – people they know well.

And, by the way, there’s absolutely no evidence there’s more child abduction or molestation now than there was 30, 50, or 100 years ago. We simply talk about it now. And talk about it, and talk about it, and talk about it. The evening news and television crime shows amplify each rare incident for its emotional gut-punch and titillation value. It gooses our inner-most fears and so garners our attention, leaving us thinking there are predators hiding behind every corner.

Will our kids be victims of our crime-ridden society if we let them roam free? It’s possible, but what most Americans also don’t know is that violent crime is at a 30-year low. 

My ex-wife and I and our Old Town neighbors were free-range parents before the term existed. The cluster of parents on our block allowed kids to move freely from yard to yard and the 3^rd and 4^th graders walked the six blocks to the elementary school in groups of two or more. As they got a couple years older, they rode bikes to downtown restaurants, the river and Forest Park. But more than once, a subdivision parent who dropped their child off to spend the night or play for the afternoon called us in anger after realizing we’d let them walk a few blocks with other kids to the square for ice cream in the afternoon or for pancakes on a Saturday morning.

So how do most modern American children spend their free time? Studies show that over 90% of their time is spent in front of TV, video gaming systems, and hand-held electronic devices. This one-generation avalanche of change isn’t just depriving children of learning independence. Visit any American school today and you’ll note the large number of overweight children and teenagers. Instead of moving about their neighborhood and community getting exercise and directing their own activites, they’re sitting on their butts consuming brain candy.

And when they head out to activities it’s behind the wheel of the family urban assault vehicle to adult-directed sports where scores of parents sit, watching breathlessly. When I was a kid, the parents dropped you off and came back when practice was over - or you walk there and back on your own. Somehow I, and my peers survived. But in a single generation we created a nation of overweight children who are deprived of time to direct their own activities – something that was normal and expected for all previous generations of American kids. That free-range world is where they burned off calories, learned to solve problems on their own, learned to lead, and came to understand how their communities worked.

But my clients Randy and Kathy are ready to be free-range parents. Randy lamented his children had been living in a “landlocked place” – a modern American subdivision. They are going to give that up and allow their children to roam the sidewalks of the tree line streets – within reason.

And of course the term “free-range parent,” has it kinda backwards. It’s the kids who become free-range. As long as they're home before the street lights come on, isn’t that a better way to live?


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Serving People At Their Best And Most Broken

Sheri seemed happy and relaxed while she met the buyers of her home and we all gathered around the closing table, but as she began signing the opening closing statement, I noticed a wet droplet splattered on the paper near her pen, and then another and another. She froze mid-signature.

Her face was hidden by a sweep of blonde hair. I leaned near, put a hand on her shoulder and whispered, "You okay?"

She didn't look up, only shook her head side to side. The buyers, their Realtor, and the closing agent each looked on with concern from around the table. "Let's step outside for a minute,” I said. I looked to the others, "Can you give us a moment?"

In the hall Sheri leaned against the wall sobbing into her hands. I found an empty office down the hall where she could be alone, and a box of Kleenix. I'd known her and her newly-ex-husband for several years. This was the final symbol of the failure of their marriage – the selling of the house where they had made a home together. She’d been an emotional rock during every step of the process, until now. But who could blame her?

For the rest of that closing I shuttled papers from the closing room to Sheri so she could sign and grieve in privacy. When it was done I gave the buyers the keys to the house, told them when trash day was, bid them farewell and waited to make sure they were gone before I got Sheri and walked her to her car.

Moments like this in real estate make me thankful I took so many psychology classes in college. When I got a license 21 years ago I thought I’d simply help people buy and sell houses. It took a couple years before I realized I would be serving people at the most hopeful and some of the most broken moments of their lives. I've shepherded scores of people through foreclosures, relocations in and out of state, sold their homes and found them new ones during and after divorces, marriages, births of babies, job losses and deaths.

The biggest lesson I've learned: I'm not a salesman. That's not what I do.

Often, the most enjoyable transactions are with young couples in their 20s who can't quite believe they're actually old enough to buy a house. They’re giddy and hopeful but also young enough they half expect their parents to pop out from behind a doorway and stop this fantasy game of playing house. And for many young couples, closing on that first home is nearly as big a deal as their wedding. The marriage was their choice alone – hell, something even teenagers do, but a home purchase is the gateway to real adulthood, proof that they’re not only becoming a family, but that they were examined by the grown-up business world and found worthy of a loan.

Helping those struggling for a better life is also something you never forget.

A decade ago as I manned the front desk at our office, a 30-something woman came in and asked if I would help her find a house. Looking beleaguered but hopeful, she told me of sporadic child support checks, of late nights as a bartender, of a poorly maintained apartment and her two daughters who deserved a better life. We started where we always start, with the loan.

I took her across the hall to our in-house lender and quickly discovered that this bartender wasn’t claiming cash tips on her taxes and had little credit background to qualify her for a loan. The lender and I wrote out a list of things she would need to do in the next year to qualify to buy. She left defeated.

I checked in with her several times over the next few months, asking how things were going. She’d offer ho-hum answers, share successes and setbacks. Eventually, perhaps embarrassed that I'd become a second hand witness to her struggles, she ignored my calls and we lost touch.

About a year after that first visit the secretary called over the intercom to say I had a visitor in the lobby. There was the bartender, standing nervously by the door with a slip of paper in her hand. It was the to-do list the lender and I had jotted down for her. It was sun-faded from weeks and months on the dashboard of her car and there was a puckered coffee cup ring in the middle. What’s more, each line-item was struck through. Looking uncertain, she held the list out to me and said, "I did what you told me to do. Can I have a house now?"

The day we closed on that modest little house didn't do much for my bank account, but seeing the bartender and her daughters on the front steps of that house with the keys in hand made a big difference in my professional perspective. I realized I wasn’t a salesman and never have been. I don’t “sell” people. I’m successful, but I’m a Realtor who loses business on a regular basis to real estate sales people. I’m simply not a salesman. Instead, my job is to get people what they want.

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