Tale Of The Lonely Sandwich

I need a break. Bet you do too.

A break from Covid, from idiotic mandates, from the most inept president in history and from the somber 20th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on American soil and the memories it rekindled. (And if you think the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 was in any way comparable to jihadis slamming commercial jets into buildings and killing thousands of innocent Americans, go somewhere else. There are plenty of websites pushing that false equivalency.)

Now, where was I? 

Ah, yes. I need a break from all the stress and the threats to our constitutional republic. So today, a vignette. Perhaps a pointless one. 

Late Friday afternoon my daughter and I were dashing into Whole Foods on Laskin Road to pick up some fish for dinner. 

I lingered at the car for a moment while she headed to the store. When I caught up she pointed to an elderly man shuffling through the parked cars.

“That guy just asked me for money,” she said. “He said he was hungry.”

She didn’t have her wallet, so he ambled away.

I should mention that my daughter has a soft spot for panhandlers. In 2002, I wrote a column for The Virginian-Pilot about her handing a fistful of babysitting dollars to a boozy homeless woman in a supermarket parking lot. I was both touched by my kid's generosity and worried I was raising a chump as I watched the woman stagger toward the ABC store a block away.

That column caused a reader to send me an anonymous letter and a crisp $20 bill. The instructions were to give it to my girl so she'd know that doing the right thing brings unexpected blessings.

I could see what my daughter meant this time, though. This wasn’t a woman reeking of gin, claiming she had triplets in a nearby hotel room and nothing to feed them. The man looked hungry. And the nearest liquor store was half a mile away.

“ Let’s buy him a sandwich,” I suggested, thinking that there was something particularly poignant about an emaciated man begging outside a store where customers were whipping out their credit cards to pay astronomical amounts for chia seeds, truffles and kombucha.

So we sprinted inside, grabbed our salmon and an overpriced sandwich and headed back to the parking lot.

No sign of the man.

We drove slowly up and down the aisles, peering between the Range Rovers and Escalades to see if he’d passed out, but no thin man.

We drove over to the Kroger lot to see if he was slumming. 

No luck. 

We drove west on Laskin and then east. No sign of him.

“For a hungry guy, he sure walks fast,” my daughter observed with a frown. 

“So what do we do with this?”I asked pointing at the sandwich on the console. 

“We can’t take it home,” she said flatly. “We bought this for a homeless person and we should give it to one.”

Then the strangest thing happened: We drove to all of the haunts that are popular with panhandlers and couldn’t find a single beggar. It was as if they’d taken the early slide for the weekend.

The guy and his dog by the Harris Teeter were gone. The woman who sits near the entrance to Target was missing. The man who claims to be a veteran near the entrance to the Kroger lot was not there. We drove to the interstate off-ramps, the 7-Elevens at the oceanfront.

No dice. Not a single beggar anywhere.

“Where are homeless people when you need one?” I muttered.

“Wait, there’s one,” my daughter, exclaimed, pointing to a woman siting in the Pet Smart lot with a pile of stuff around her. But as we approached, we saw her designer bag and that she was talking on an iPhone. 

No sandwich for her.

Finally, we headed home and put the lonely sandwich in the fridge.

On Sunday afternoon, a scruffy man on a median strip with a hand-lettered sign that read, “Hungry, anything will help,” approached my car on First Colonial Road.

“If you’d been here Friday you could have had a sandwich,” I said, as I handed him a dollar.

He looked puzzled.

I know, I know. The city disapproves of giving money to beggars. It only encourages them, they say. And when the topic came up during one of our radio shows a few months ago, callers insisted that many of the people with their sad cardboard signs are actually getting rich on handouts.

“You should see the cars they drive,” declared one caller who claimed to have followed a family of panhandlers to their late-model SUV.

But that old guy. He did look like he was starving.

On the other hand, he did make a remarkably quick getaway.