$6 - 6 days DAY 6 Keep Soap alive

Looks like the best (or worst) has been saved for last yet again! My last dive into the pool of philanthropy, if you can call it that, was into the deep end. It had been 3 weeks and in that 3 weeks I still had my $6 in my pocket and hadn’t managed to give away a lousy $1. (ok for those of you who must be precise I only have $5 in my pocket because of the early on walk-by snatching) So for my last act of charity I decided that I would go for the guaranteed giveaway…

There are approximately 35,094 homeless individuals in NYC as of January 2008 as reported by the City Of New York and those are only the ones who can be counted at the various and growing number of shelters throughout the city. I can only imagine how many more there must be who never make it to a shelter, or get turned away at the door because there simply isn’t anymore room.

I think they should start including Port Authority in their census because I think I know where all the rest of the homeless go when the shelters are full…

In the early morning hours the lines for the bathroom are longer than the lines for the buses. While I do appreciate the effort, there is only so much you can get done at the sink in a bathroom the size of my cubicle at work (and it’s not a big cubicle) and one of those midget hotel soaps. (why DO they make the soap so damn small in hotels?)

So I decided that however insignificant I was going to make something happen with my $6 so I took a trip to the Rite Aid (that’s a drug store for those of you who may not be from around here) across the street and purchased 6 bars of their finest Irish Spring!

I worked my way through the crowd like a salmon swimming upstream (NYC residents are not the most polite or mannered folks at all times) and made my way to the bathroom. As I fully expected there were 3 gentlemen engaged in their morning ritual of transforming the bathroom into some kind of oddball day spa (complete with fountain because one of the stall toilets was clogged). So without pomp or circumstance I simply laid a bar of soap in front of each of them on the sink, left the 3 extras and smiled and took my leave.

Now I have no idea what the men thought, or what the reaction was so there is no funny story to tell or an ensuing adventure. Not a curse word or a question just one human giving to another human simply because. So know that the next time you pass a homeless man in NYC and he has that surprisingly fresh and clean as a whistle scent that my $6 did not go to waste on some frivolous purchase, but rather went to helping someone if even in a miniscule way.

This little experiment of mine has given me some new and interesting insights not least among them that suspicion and paranoia has grown to the point that we can no longer accept kindness for fear of the unknown always waiting for “the catch”. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing in this world we live in. I will leave that for you to decide for yourself.