Lady-beggars and cardboard signs

It was one of those rare sunny and warm march days in Belgium. Like a june-day whose timing was off. I had succesfully snuck out of the office to steal some of these exclusive sunrays. For about an hour or so, I had curled down in a chair on a lightly windy terrace in the warm shade of tall trees and read. As I floated back to work, still a little philosophical after my reading, I came by an old lady-beggar.

She was seated against a wall, amidst a mob of sunglassed, w(h)ining, salad-eating ladies and cigarsmoking men. It felt almost like someone had purposefully put her there but forgot the cardboard sign saying something like “What do you get someone who has it all? Might I suggest a tombstone saying 'So what?!'” Or simply “Leave your change and fuck off”.

She sat there, casually wearing her reebok sneakers she'd worn forever and that had almost turned vintage by now. Also, she was wearing a red Jet Air hat, which I very much doubted to be a memory of a long-gone sunny holiday. And if it were, which dramatically added to the tragicomic appearance of the woman.

“Good afternoon”, she said as I passed by. “ ' afternoon”, I mumbled incomprehensively but smiling and starkly staring ahead.

Hurrying on I was thoroughly disturbed by my reaction. It was dangling undecidedly somewhere in between genuine friendliness and unnerving awkwardness. As if my soul and mind had simultaneously sent completely opposite stimuli to my brain, and in some kind of system-overload it had found no better alternative than to have me execute both at the same time.

Then it dawned on me that I had witnessed exactly that reaction over a million times. People distressedly hurrying on as a beggar addressed them. As if it were a piece of furniture that had suddenly started speaking. The same I-have-no-default-reaction-to-this-situation helplessness of a comedian who just made a joke that nobody laughed at. And I couldn't help but wonder what it was that made them so uncomfortable to us.

Was it their blunt way of making us make up our minds? Since life had obviously forced them into one camp, the only fun left to them was poking our unpeaceful, un-made-up minds.

Or maybe we get confused because somehow we are well-aware that “Good afternoon” in Beggar-ese really means “Would you sponsor the next crate of beer and pack of cigarettes that will further fuck up my life, liver and lungs?”.

All this while everyday's paper is filled with endless opportunities to spend our charity-funds to. We get so overwhelmed with misery that, not knowing where to start helping or how, we don't start at all.

And it made me angry, this messy mixture of misery and confusion on such a beautiful day. Like a tiny cloud that had shaded my Utopia sun for a while.

Then it dawned on me that, as she was self-explanatorily sitting there, that reebok-wearing Jet Air-hattet lady-beggar, she really needed no cardboard sign at all.