Failure

The seat was warm.

His music preceded him; a few surprisingly melodic snatches on a battered harmonica.

He was wrinkled; cubic zirconia studs in each of his large leathered lobes. Shoulders hunched forward in a standard olive green overcoat, he staggered with the off-beat roll of a hurrying subway car.

He dropped the arm that held the instrument to reveal a droopy under bite, proffering his other grubby hand to a nearby passenger. The passenger, an American girl, nudged her male companion who immediately offered the ajushee a few coins. The man accepted them soundlessly, remotely—as if it was expected. He added them to a zippered pack around his waist, and moved expectantly to the next foreign sucker.

I feigned poverty and shook my head slightly, and hesitated, he moved on down the long row of soulless eyes whose emotions and feelings, if any, were carefully hidden beneath the obscurity of l'humanité en masse. A few more harmonica blues wafted on with him.

The girl nudged me. “How many of these people do you think are heading to church?” she asked.

I glanced again down the line of glassy eyed passenger, dozing or meditating in their glittery ties, polyester suits, heals, and faux fur collars.

“50%.”

She didn’t respond, so I asked her the same.

“More than half,” she answered, and said nothing more.

The seat was warm. I love these heated subway seats.

We sat in silence. I mulled thoughts of being late to church myself and what I’d possibly eat and do afterwards.

Suddenly, she turned to me again.

“Always give what is asked of you,” she said.

Feeling guilty, I gave a paltry tithe at church an hour later. Perhaps the ajushee is cackling merrily amongst broken green bottles in the gutter, having spent the genuine tinder of gullible foreigners. Perhaps he’s sitting at the hospital bedside of a beloved. Perhaps he’s huddling over the stovetop of a streetfood vendor, waiting for a hand-sized portion of dukbokki. Or maybe he’s in heaven giving witness to the ones who gave to the Christ Child and the ones who sat stonily in church.

He who gives to the poor will lack nothing, but he who closes his eyes to them receives many curses. Proverbs 28:27

One man gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty. Proverbs 11:24