I smile at people, even if I don't know them, young, old, clean, dirty, toothless. It's just the way I am and it's a habit I didn't think I had to break myself of until recently. Four times this week, I smiled at someone while I was out and about in the city of Flint and they took that as some kind of queue to come up and ask me for money — once at 7-11, once while standing in line, again while walking to my car in the Meijer's parking lot, and again yesterday while waiting in a drive-through for my $2 order of food. But then again, anyone who has lived in Flint long enough knows that sometimes all it takes is making eye contact.
I refuse to live in a world in which we cannot look our fellow sisters and brothers directly in the eye.
We lived downtown when I was a teenager and there was a woman who came knocking on our door asking for money to feed her 6 children. My mother told her she didn't have any money to give her, but she could spare some food. She told her if she would come once a week to pick it up, there would be a bag on the steps for her. For a few weeks, my mother placed a bag of groceries on the porch steps but the lady never came around to collect it so she stopped leaving it for her. Later that summer, she came around again, asking for money for a sick relative who was in the hospital. She was either persistent or very forgetful because once we stopped leaving the food out, she resumed making the rounds regularly, each time it was a different tragic story. She should have been on Broadway. Such wasted talent.
Go on over and check out One Small Project, a site about leftover people, leftover spaces, and leftover materials. While you're there, don't miss the Flint Gallery from a few years back. The following is a clip of text from an article on the site titled, Compared to What:
“Sorry Bossman.”
I’m in an SUV in an abandoned lot at 3rd and Grand Traverse. Flint, Michigan. It’s concrete and asphalt, overgrown, untended (intended? unintended?) with a broken down telephone booth, liquor store, and gasoline station nearby.
Tim reaches in to shake hands with Mickel, passenger seat, and I flinch, involuntary, concerned about Mickel’s safety and digital camera. Tim jerks his hand out, involuntary. “Sorry Bossman,” as he steps back, “I’m a college student.” Then he asks about money for the bus, the telephone. I’d given fifty cents to a woman in the liquor store parking lot. Tim cut me off: “I don’t care what you did for her. I need money Bossman.”