Days 8-15

I've been working through some weird fear issues around money lately. "Weird" because I'm not certain where they stem from. Maybe it has something to do with my former six-figure salary vanishing in smoke as my health decided to crash a while ago. And the medical bills that piled up soon thereafter. Hmmm. Need to sit with that one for a while. Oh wait, I have been. Never mind.

But in the meantime, I chose to give in a manner that will help me be more at peace with that fear. For the past week, I have been very generous and giving with money, specifically tips. I've never been a waitress or in another profession where tips sustain, although I did have a memorable stint working in my undergrad late-night snack bar a very long time ago. But that's another story. I've always had a deep respect for the profession, however, as I believe it's super hard - you're on your feet all day, long hours, memorizing tons of information, balancing a bunch of stuff without tripping over people, and doing it with a smile to boot. SO... I have tipped and tipped big, and I have handed out a bunch of money to my neighborhood homeless folk over the past week, pretty much every day.

The most I've given is $60 (all the cash I had in my wallet) to a wonderfully enlightened man, Dan, who made me laugh through one of my worst days when all I could see and feel was pain and doomsday scenarios for the rest of my life. I'd just gotten off the bus after having been told by yet another doctor that he had no solutions for me. Dan sang me a song, he recited poems, he made me laugh, and he told me how he's the luckiest person alive because "the sky is [his] ceiling and the earth [his] floor, and the four corners of the earth [his] walls."

"Watch all these people rush around like they have so many important things to do and be and accomplish," he observed, in a sad, knowing way as we crouched down together at the corner of Market & Van Ness. "Where are they all going? Don't they get it?" He was waiting to pick up his free medication that would help him with the pain in his useless legs. The stick he used to prop him up was lost on a street somewhere along with his shopping cart of sparse belongings as he was rushed to General Hospital a few days earlier. In the meantime, he sipped at his "powerful healing water," i.e. cheap vodka, as a painkiller. Who could blame him?

He tried to give me the money back, almost tearing up, saying he didn't want my money. Saying that I had made him smile and that was enough. He meant it. I convinced him to take the money only after I said he could use it to help his friends who needed it more than he did.

While we were sitting there together, another homeless person came up to him and gave him her own dollar, all the money she had, because "you look like you need it more than I do."

I will never forget that day.

Seriously, I need to get over this absurd, ridiculous, and ridiculously annoying fear. I am beyond rich in so many ways.