The Charity Collector

"Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation."
- Wislawa Szymborska in an interview with James Hopkin, The Guardian

My Mother apps me, somewhat unintelligibly,
.??CRAZY Americanz im SilicV!!.
See tiu lawrt in court im Us!!!
WBOOPS
What is a good person??? good,, night

I check the time at which she wrote this and calculate the wine before, during, and after dinner will allow me to tone down the punctuation. There is no urgency to reply. I google for a reference on WBOOPS - which has to refer to a Netflix series – in vain. I type back (the following morning) that, I just wrote about good. Without evil set alongside it you get facile judgements. I hope that shows some accord.

My Mother seldom apps me and when she does, a single line (of indignation) at most. Four lines means, that coffee we had yesterday must have left her feeling connected. That is a small triumph for womankind. She is of the generation, in the marriage, born under the star, and had the childhood to make you want to (in her own words) “float up like a little balloon, up into the sky, high above the clouds till nobody can see you.” It makes for the kind of woman you don’t pick up with kid gloves.

Am I any easier to approach? My life-long dread to end up like my mother is starting to feel quite real. Love her dearly, but not her life. It is very her, not me. Or so I used to hope with the fight that was still left in me against the genes and the environmental factors.

Not unlike my mother, it could be said I have identifiable causes for not being as approachable or likeable as I might have liked to have been. I walk around with my most courteous heart on my sleeve (which precisely is offensive rather than refreshing), and though I take an interest in anything that breathes - and much that does not (books and paintings I’d leave in the middle), the fact remains, it is plain to see, I meet little by way of human nature that I care to let arrest my attention when I make the effort to go out, while by staying indoors, I attract the weirdest characters who end up wasting my time. Those who did, literally, ALL have rung my doorbell. I didn't go walking into snyde traps. I just couldn't get away! My mother’s assessment of my love life is totally invalid: “You go out looking for trouble and bring home damaged goods.” No. They ALL came and found me. I am not at fault in that deparment. I am not the typical restless single or the needy one. It’s the “NO, piss off” bit that’s the bit I never quite mastered the timing of.

When I am off my guard, the needy start to gather on my garden path. As long as I growl and show my teeth they tend to slip the post though the letterbox and tiptoe away again. But I note the signs and can tell things are reverting back to the relaxed mode of I am every person and why cannot every person live in me. With my son no longer cramping my style (demanding I act normal and not be loud) I even let the new neighbours across the road use my toilet when they had locked themselves out, the other day. (It was sooo weird having little persons in my hallway, and a woman who is not my mother. It kept me buzzing all night.)

But it got a bit weird yesterday. Or I really have not been out enough in the new millenium.

This door is somewhere in Carmen de Patagones, Argentina, a photo taken by Tina Gabes. My own door is giving me some concerns right now - letting the draught in, needs new lock - but this one reminds me it could be worse.

The ring at the door

I am in the garden, writing about my library assistant – who has no trouble approaching me, by the way, but this for another time – when the doorbell rings. I open to find a young prins Harry seeking a donation for very sorry little children. The T-shirt, the ID tag, the clipboard make this all so clear I do him the favour of not having to go through his script – which I can tell will be of the kind that aims to have a little social banter with me first – knowing in advance, on principle, he won’t be able to strike lucky with me. I tell him so, in the nicest possible way. Don’t take it personally, I begin my own script, hoping though he’s not the sort to enter into an eager debate on my lack of charity and how it doesn’t rhyme with the kind and socially engaged woman (now all of a sudden) I appear to be.

I have lost track of time, but the sun out front shows me it has to be around his dinner time. Sneaky how they come around then, expecting us to be home and easily swayed to feel generous with our satiated tummies. No luck here, buster, I still run on Spanish time, as far as that goes.

I give him my broadest smile. That ought to do for a gift. Otherwise a scare. Okay, he says, unfazed, but adds, Have you got something to drink? Just like that, as if he’s in a hotel restaurant about to close but maybe they still do drinks. Is this a new sales pitch? Leading me by way of analogy? Just know, while your fridge is stocked, there are little babies dying. You have they have not: am I supposed to donate milk? The request is akwardly phrased to my ears, but maybe I am hearing him as I might a student, triggered back into a setting of one-on-one teaching.

I note it takes running through several textworld possiblities before I suppose he means to ask for himself out of a personal need. I have become renewedly unsure about the way of this world in the past year.
Water? I offer, still perplexed. I do not live in el quinto pino, on the heath under a scorching sun. There is a petrol station, a snackbar, an ice-cream parlour around the corner. Is this Saturn and Pluto cojoined in Venus, asking us to become one happy family? To ask for water is one thing. But a drink? Should I have given him a choice? Tea, coffee, apple-carrot-ginger juice?

And now with some hesitation, he supposes that would do (!). As if there is any other drink suited to quenching thirst in an acute situation?! He has to be on the brink of fainting, surely: why else ask a perfect stranger, who you have interrupted, possibly during dinner, and who has turned you down, clearly not in a sociable mood, for a drink (not a glass of water even, which is universal code for: in need of rescue).

I go and fetch some water

I am still nervous about leaving him at the door while I go off to get him his drink. He is young, flushing red, very ginger and very curly, a bit squidy, by which I mean to say, very much his own person and not a con-man aiming to look like Clooney. Still, you can't tell nowadays. Will he stay there, or is this the moment he follows me in, locks the door behind him and strikes. It is barely above 20 degrees out there. I already hear myself, cloaked in a blanket at the police station, sounding naïve, refuting I never let him in when the officer questions by what excuse did he seek entry?

I return with an empty glass so that I can pour out the “organic” (health food shop) water in front of him. You can’t fault my doorstep hospitality. I have worked with a Czech in the restaurant business and heard stories that made me decide to stay home or bring my own. They sure hate tourists in that part of the world who sound American, which will include the British, for they hadn’t had the exposure to Fawlty Towers next to Family Ties to be able to tell the difference. I don’t know if it was Russian indoctrination or the resentment they harboured as a nation for having been left up for grabs by a super power, but a rancour existed towards the United States I had not expected in the young (born 1973); perhaps, it was a post-wall thing, when the promised land turned out to be less attractive than always hoped. My pal assured me I’d be amongst the tourists they’d spit on literally: big gobs in your soup; little trickles of spit to froth amongst your fizzy drink.

More expensive than coca-cola, what you’re glugging down there, young man, I think to myself as I watch to see his thirst confirmed. I am alittle uncomfortable watching him drink. I now feel impolite. He had said thank you, as I had poured. But he never did embed his imposition in any further friendly chat. He hands back the glass with a curt “bye now” (dissatisfied with the no-result after all) to leave me guessing he can’t be a day over 18.

I've rung doorbells myself

And now it comes flooding back to me. This is how we are, when we we are young. The barriers are thinner. We connect to good people in our need. Our needs are simple, if ever extremely pressing.

I remember ringing the door bell of a random doctor in Barcelona, who practiced where he lived, but as a urologist - or was it a neurologist? It was a Saturday, even, I think, and the whole family was having lunch. What the hell possessed me?! I could have been a druggie trying to source a prescription. Would I have let myself in?! But he did, and the whole family waited while he took a look down my throat, called upon his general knowledge, right there at the luncheon table, to diagnose a severe case of laryngitis. I was 19, scared, and had been in great agony for several days. I was all alone in a city that was big and Catalan or just merciless on far too inexperienced English teachers. He even wrote me out a few prescriptions. (The first and last painkillers and anti-biotics I have taken in my life, although that was not the last bout of laryngitis.)

Such moves one makes are little requests to rock the the cradle of an infant Selfhood. They do not come from the brain your parents gave you, or the knowledge your teachers bullied into you.

They are part of that ball of dung you are rolling into a Sisyphaen boulder. Necessary for the future. Arduous on the present. But also very much the work of your inner angel believing in mankind (like a child).

Don’t let that bowling ball thundering back downhill put you off. It all comes round again, in the next one who is just like you, to proove it is worth trusting in the likes of us, children of a lesser god.

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More on Dung Beetles as cosmic navigators – scientifically proven here

The photo of the dung beetle who sits like a king on top of his own world is by michlogan