Drive-By Charity

I was driving with a couple of friends when we saw a homeless man standing at a stoplight with a sign stating "Anything Helps". As we were stopped a few cars away from him, my friend in the front seat remarked that she wished she had some food to give him - I remembered that I had a banana in my bag so I quickly dug it out.

"Do you want me to stop so that you can hand it to him?" my friend that was driving asked.

"Well," I said as I considered the traffic we were in, "just do a drive-by".

I was thinking we could slow down long enough for me to hand it to him out the window then quickly drive off before causing any drivers behind us to get irritated. I rolled down the window and held the banana outside the window to get his attention and expedite the process of handing it over. As the traffic started to slowly move forward, the man noticed my hand holding the banana out the window, walked over to the curb and stretched out his hand with a grateful nod and smile.

His hand was two inches away from the banana when my friend hit the gas. She had thought the handoff was successful, and wanted to stop blocking traffic. I had just enough time to look up and see a bewildered look before we sped away.

Now there I was, realizing that I had just taunted this poor hungry man with food. I had literally dangled it in front of his face before snatching it away, leaving behind only a squeal of tires and a cloud of exhaust. How cruel is that?? I had a split second to think of how horrible it must have seemed to him. So I did the only thing I could think of to attempt to ameliorate the situation - I leaned out of the window and boomeranged that banana from our speeding car.

We were probably already twenty feet away from him, but man did that fruit sail through the air. For a split second I was afraid I was going to hit the poor man with my projectile fruit, adding injury to insult. But instead it flew past him and landed behind him in the dirt. Which just added insult to insult.

When I suggested we do a "drive-by"*, little did I know we would actually be conducting an attack. I just hope that our good intentions outweigh the callous and violent manner in which we distributed our charity. I didn't see what the homeless man did next or how he reacted to having food thrown at him (I had collapsed on the back seat, half in tears of mortification and half laughing hysterically), but I'd like to think that he just laughed and enjoyed the banana.

"*A drive-by is a form of hit-and-run tactic, a personal attack carried out by an individual or individuals from a moving or momentarily stopped vehicle. The objective is to overwhelm the target by a sudden, massive amount of firepower without attention to accuracy (Wikipedia).