The very least

Hooray! My broker's license class is over. *sigh* Now only a review session (Monday) and the 3-hour test (Thursday) stand in my way. Tomorrow it's back to work with Mom. And thank goodness. I learned to love San Francisco during this last week, the longest of my life. But I will NOT miss BART. Nope. BART may have zipped me to class each day, but there were so many weird people on that one train. And they all found a way to take my train, too. Let's list a few of my (least) favorites:

-Likes-To-Hear-Herself-Talk-Chick... the woman stood loudly joking to her friends about how she heard that, "George W. Bush can't even pro-NOUNCE Katrina! No, HA HA HA, SER-iously!" I wasn't the only one rolling my eyes and wishing that she'd lower her viewpoint by at least a decible.

-No-Sense-Of-Personal-Space-Guy... he found his way onto the train, cramming in just as the doors sucked shut and locked us all closely together. Very closely. At least you would have thought so. He was grabbing the ceiling rail right next to me, shoulder to my shoulder. I could feel his breath on me. And the best part was lurching to a stop and clunking knees with him. No, wait, the actual best part was looking around the car and noting all the space that was available for standing, but wasn't being used.

-Unnecessarily-Loud-Walkman-Dude... he pushed through the doors of the train, bringing with him the joyful beat of "Cellllabrate good times, Come on!" Technically the bass-less tune was pumping from the walkman he held in his hands. And why, you ask, could everyone else in the car hear the song, too? Well, the man had accidentally pulled the headphones from the walkman, letting the music play through the speakers alone. Wonderful! In fact, it made me want to celebrate.

-Woman-With-Excrutiatingly-Abnoxious-Children... I think her title speaks for itself. How sweet. Little Johnnie and Janie Junior were jumping back and forth over the seat in front of them, shrieking loudly all the way. Two! Four! Six! Eight! What don't we appreciate?! Children! Children! Ill-mannered Children!

-Self-Absorbed-Swearing-Guy-With-A-Phone... "Hello, Mike? Mike? This is Jeff. Yeah, I need you to fax those Z29 Forms over to the New York office right away. No, the guy in accounting over there is such a @(*)#! Listen, the Limited Real Estate Clause has to be revised. Do that. Give me a #)(*@&# break! I worked fourteen hours yesterday to keep the LA office off your @#)&. Yeah. Right." Click. Let's all hope those Z29s go through ASAP (Which he pronounced as if it were a word rather than an acronym. I hate that.).

-The-Ethnic-Food-Eater... Nothing against good food from any other country, but it smells. Whatever this woman was eating, at 6:45am, was barely contained in its little white styrofoam leftover box, and it was gross! Think seafood, curry, stinky cheese. Anything smelly. She ate it while we were all stuck together in that teensy, air-tight train car.

-Obscene-Lip-Licker-Guy... he got on the train at West Oakland station and, as we took off eastward, he looked directly at me and slowly, diliberately licked his lips. Ugh! I mean, I knew that kind of thing happened to people (unfortunately), but I really had hoped it wouldn't happen to me. At Lake Merritt station he detrained... one stop after he boarded... which made me wonder if he simply rode BART to lick his lips at poor, unsuspecting women. Gross.

-Wannabe-Thugs... two of them, sagging jeans, dirty tank tops, yelling obscenities at each other, shoving each other, laughing raucously at each other. Not a second thought about their inappropriate behavior. A whole trip home was disrupted as they swung on the ceiling bars like apes and disturbed little elderly ladies.

I'm sure there were more, but I'm blocking them from my memory. However, to be fair to the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and the convenience it brings to our lives, there were a few nice people on the train. For instance:

-Mr. Chivalrous... a young man with a backpack and an Ipod who made sure to give up his seat for an elderly lady who boarded the train. He also made sure to let myself and another girl exit the train before the throng of crazed homegoers could trample us to the ground. A nice guy.

-The-Door-Catcher... who heard a frazzled cry to "Wait!" and stopped the doors from closing long enough for a young woman in a suit to slip onto the train at the last second. "Oh, thanks! I have a big meeting at 8:00!"

-All-People-Who-Put-Their-Phones-On-Vibrate... nothing pierces the early morning air and shatters the just-waking eardrums like a whining, polyphonic rendition of "Hit Me Baby, One More Time". Thank goodness for the considerate people who silenced their cells.

It balances out, I suppose. And it was so convenient to rise from the underground station via escalator, into the crisp city breeze and the bustle of the city morning. The city remains to be something of an anomaly to me, of course. But eventually the constant movement of all people and things became less incessant and more inspiring. These folks were busy and off to work. Dead leaves whisked along in the gutters with the wind. There is always someplace to go, something to do, someone to talk to.

And there are always people who are stopped, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the street, in the middle of their lives. These people, nameless, jobless, homeless, shameless people, hunker down at odd corners holding out their hands. It has always been hard for me to simply walk on by. But once, when my mom was driving through the city, a man walked up without warning and spit on her car window. Another time a friend of mine and his wife were mugged by such a man. I hate those stories.

Collectively these people scare us because they are the opposite of us and we don't understand such a drastic, even violent difference. I'm afraid, too. Still, while these people, usually men, lack so much, I have a hard time believing that they are all simply heartless, too. At some point they were all little boys who walked to school or threw paper airplanes or traded baseball cards. They have mothers and fathers, maybe siblings. Once they may even have had hope.

I walked up to one such man and dropped thirty-five cents, the change from my early morning diet Coke purchase, into his dirty, outstretched hands.

A friend of mine scoffed, "Audrey, don't to that. Some of these guys even have jobs, and just do this for the money." That could be true. I read somewhere about a CEO who was arrested for posing as a homeless man on his lunch breaks to bring in tax-free money. Something makes me think, though, that people like that are in the minority.

In New Orleans, people say, the majority of those who died or were stranded were poor, even homeless, and black. People accuse our president of using those statistics as a reason to delay recovery and relief. (I think this is terrible and absurd.)

Well, the man I gave change to for the last week is also poor, homeless and black. Maybe he's planning to pool the pitiful offerings of suckers like me and go out and buy liquor, and he'll wake up in that same stairwell every day, never shower, scare people with his degeneration. Or maybe he has a soul that is in need of just as much kindness as the people whom I look upon as my friends. Most likely both ideas are true.

I believe that we who are able to do for those less fortunate, "the least of these", are helping to continue an age-old tradition of charity and brotherly love. If the man sitting on the sidewalk claiming to be a "disabled veteran" and/or willing to "work for food" is already damned, nothing I can do will save him, and nothing I can do will hurt him any more than he is hurting already. This particular man smiled and blessed me. And I don't just push that aside. This is the very least I can do.