I am not usually a "do-gooder" type of person. I am nice to people and at Christmas I buy presents for a needy kid, but that's about it. So I was surprised when I found myself hankering to do a good deed last night. I made an extra lunch and packed it all up real nice in a Target bag to give to a homeless person (they're on every busy street corner around here). It had a peanut butter sandwich, corn chips, an orange and some weird bacon-cheese muffins that I made last night. It was a pretty good lunch, if I do say so myself...for a minute I was tempted to take it to work and eat it, but I guilt-tripped myself into resisting (the spanakopita leftovers from last night's dinner helped too).


So I went one light further than I normally do on my morning commute and saw this lady, maybe in her fifties, standing on the corner. Her sign read "Down on luck". It didn't specifically say she was hungry, like many of their signs do, but I decided to give her the lunch anyway. I rolled down my window and stuck the Target bag out and said, "I brought you some lunch." She seemed pretty happy with it - she proceeded to talk my ear off for the rest of the time I was sitting at the red light, telling me how she and her son spend every night in a motel with the money they earn begging and how most people just offer her beer and cigarettes. One man, apparently, threw a beer at her after she refused it the other night. She also said she appreciated the orange more than anything because she tries to eat healthy but she mainly gets junk food on the streets. She said that she and her son go to Luby's whenever they can, to get their servings of vegetables.


I really have no idea whether she was BS'ing me or not, but I really don't care. I have a feeling that lunch will get eaten, if it hasn't been eaten already. I know it's stupid to make this big a fuss over something that I should be doing anyway, but I just feel good about it, in a Mother Teresa kind of way. Perhaps I will start doing this more often. I'm not rich, but I have so much more than many other people and I want to share. Ya know?

Jen from nowhere @ 11:18 AM