Issue #10

Greedy Grabber, C’est Moi

Every Thursday the distribution table at the Hanalei food pantry is set with rice, bread, granola, pasta, snack bars, crackers, cookies, and a collection of condiments (injectable butter, ham glaze) and old holiday candy somebody didn’t want. One by one local patrons make their selections. The more precious offerings of milk, cheese, eggs, meat, a bag of canned goods, and pet food are kept off the table and doled out by us volunteers.

Most people who come for food are pleasant, considerate of those behind them, and appreciative of volunteers. Some are chatty, some avoid eye contact.

But a few are what I call greedy grabbers. When they show up we roll our eyes. They sneak extra loaves of bread in their boxes or pretend they haven’t already gotten their meat allotment and ask for another. To move them along my friend Susan always says, “Are you pau?” (You done?)

Last Thursday, an old man showed up with all the hallmarks of a greedy grabber—hanging around the table too long, asking for more this, more that, and holding up the line. He was quick-moving, fit and trim like a surfer, but his face was decades older, his features seeming to melt down his face in weariness. His front teeth were gone. Two perfectly triangular fangs presumably helped him bite into his food.

When he asked for a second box of cookies, I shook my head. I was fed up and tired of accommodating him. Even though there were at least ten cases of Chips Ahoy in the back, I said, “We have to save some for other people.”

At that moment, Richard, who’s worked the food pantry forever, knows all the locals and confers special favor on the ones who need help the most, came to the table and greeted him. “Uncle!” (“uncle” being a term of respect for all elderly men in Hawaii), “Uncle, you can have whatever you want.” Richard handed him two more boxes of cookies.

Uncle looked more hangdog than ever. I felt embarrassed, for myself, for him. No one over the age of five should have to beg for cookies. He must have wanted to explain himself because he told me he had just been diagnosed with cancer. Esophageal cancer.

“I’m so sorry!” I said. I put three extra bottles of Ensure in his box, as if that would change his dire situation. “I’ve had cancer too,” I told him. In my heart this bid for connection felt hollow—esophageal cancer was a much worse cancer than what I had, and someone on our tiny island who might or might not be living in a tent was not going to get state-of-the-art care—but he seemed to take some comfort in my words and smiled sadly. Finally he moved on.

Next!

But then he came back, eyeing something else on the table. He worked out a system: he’d take a bag of canned goods, go around the back, empty out what he wanted and return the rest, saying that he found it and didn’t want it to go to waste. And then do it again.

That was the end of my Angel of Mercy act. I busied myself with chores away from the table until he was gone for good.

As I was thinking over this disappointing interaction—We had given him extra! I told him I was a cancer survivor!!—a few characters, fictional and otherwise, came to mind to offer perspective. Let me introduce you.

Estzer Ency is a well-to-do famous actress in Magda Szabo’s The Fawn (my current read). She’s survived humiliating childhood poverty, a Nazi invasion and a Communist takeover of her native Hungary. The Fawn reads as her confession, mostly told without remorse. A brilliant student, she tutored friends to make money when she was young but cheated them heartlessly:

. . . I had taught wrong things to Gizike so she would fail. If she passed I wouldn’t be giving her any more lessons, and I couldn’t help people without charging because I needed the money to live on, and because others depended on me.

After a bombing in her city leaves her own house intact, she sets out over the rubble and the 400 dead to find a tenant, which doesn’t take long—

. . . by that afternoon Eva Gaman’s mother was on her way with her two children in a country cart. I charged her an awful lot of money for the room, a really fantastic amount.

She’s a greedy grabber for sure. But I can’t hate her, she’s fascinating and ultimately a sympathetic character. The pleasure of the book is understanding her. Does it need to be said that understanding her is not the same as signing off on her actions?

Now please welcome Mrs. Shimerada, from Willa Cather’s My Antonia, another greedy grabber. Unpleasant and harsh, Mrs. Shimerada is an immigrant from Bohemia living in the unforgiving Nebraska plains, literally in a cave after being duped about the homestead her family purchased. The Shimeradas are desperately poor. When Mrs. Shimerada visits the narrator’s family in their relatively comfortable home, she criticizes everything even as she makes no secret of her desire to have what they have:

In the kitchen she caught up an iron pot that stood on the back of the stove and said: 'You got many, Shimerdas no got.' I thought it weak-minded of grandmother to give the pot to her.

After Mrs. Shimerada leaves the house, Grandmother tells her judgy grandson to judge less—

“But, you see, a body never knows what traits poverty might bring out in 'em. It makes a woman grasping to see her children want for things.”

What would Grandmother say about the old man at the food pantry, his poverty, his lost teeth, his cancer, his anxiety about his health, his fear of death, his loneliness?

There’s just one more person to bring to the conversation. Look there, it’s St. Peter, winking at me. Peter was no greedy grabber, but he’s reminding me of the perils of turning your back on someone after declaring loyalty. Because that’s what I did. I claimed to recognize the old man as my brother—cancer victims both of us—but as soon as he was inconvenient and annoying, I denied knowing him, metaphorically speaking.

And I denied another connection I had to him. My connection as a greedy grabber myself.

It’s an unattractive quality I have mostly snuffed out, but it rears up now and then. Greedy grabbiness comes from growing up not having things and suddenly having the chance to get them. Not-having becomes a habit of mind that’s hard to shake.

I did not grow up poor—we were solidly middle class—but 11 kids raised on a professor’s salary are going to do without. We shared rooms and beds (one of my brothers slept in a walk-in closet), drank powdered milk for a time, wore hand-me-downs and clothes my mother sewed, and were instructed to save on the water bill by turning off the shower when we lathered, among other economies. None of that mattered—we weren’t raised to want what other people had. The main effect was anxiety about money. My father was always saying, “This year we’re going to the poor house!” I thought the poor house was a real place and it scared me.

I won’t recount my moments as a greedy grabber. They fill me with shame. But they are part of me.

Many thanks to my guests for their commentary. I take their point. And I take what their point is not. The point is not to say, Anything goes! Let Uncle take all ten cases of Chips Ahoy! Obviously there have to be rules, order, fairness. But Estzer, Mrs. Shimerada, Grandmother, and St. Peter himself are asking me this: How might it change things to come out from behind the table and stand beside Uncle? To say, There but for the grace of God go I? To say, There go I?

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If you can’t say it, do it

My husband and I just binged-watched a British series, Gavin and Stacey, set in part in Wales. The show taught me a delightful Welsh word that I’ve been saying ever since. It is driving my husband nuts. In fact this new word almost rhymes with nuts although some people say it rhymes with butch.

Cwtsh. The pronunciation is not easy. You say the cw like coo and then add the rest, pronouncing the t and the sh separately.

“Give us a cwtsh,” Stacey says to Gavin when she gets into bed. Cwtsh means to cuddle, but it’s a certain kind of cuddle. Welsh writer Kate Leaver describes it like this in an article in BBC online:

Its second meaning is a cubbyhole or cupboard; a small space in which to store things safely. Blend those two meanings and you get a better idea of what the word means: it’s the wrapping of your arms around someone to make them feel safe in the world.

Leaver further explains, quoting another Welshwoman:

“A cwtch is something you do when you’re overflowing with joy and love at another person’s sheer existence in your life that you can’t help but try and squeeze that love into them; it’s a safe space of love and comfort for someone who needs it; it’s all the best parts of being alive and loving someone, in a pair of arms. Hugs are for everyone; cwtches are only for a few, very special people in my life.”

Isn’t that the most wonderful thing? All those words to describe the meaning of one singular sensational word!

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