Yesterday was a trip to NYC for a birthday dinner celebrating my younger daughter Sawyer who was turning 12. She’s honestly the sweetest thing so I wanted to bring her to the sweetest place: Serendipity 3. I also evidently had a desire to spend an ungodly amount of money. Birthday girl’s dad joined up with our large crew after having come up on the train from Philly. It’s truly nice we have this kind of relationship now where we can often come together for our girls. Sean and he get along fine. Ken and I can even make mild good hearted jabs at each other without subsequent explosions. Believe me, our kumbaya was not always the case and there are occasional roadblocks and we remind each other why we are no longer married, but we have put all/the majority of our garbage aside and figured out a way…slowly. Baby steps. Small wins.

Back to Serendipity: it is lit by a million Tiffany lamps and the whole place is basically wallpapered in photos of Andy Warhol and a fine coating of pink cotton candy. Sawyer aptly ordered “Cotton Candy Unicorn Birthday Waffles,” which was exactly what you are picturing it to be. Our 5 year old son ordered a hot dog that was the length of his body, and the mac and cheese portions per person could have served all of New York. “I don’t like this mac and cheese,” declared my 12 year old step son H, after taking one tiny imperceptible bite. “Too flavorful? I asked. He enjoys a good Velveta or Kraft that is diluted in milk. He also gagged at the frozen hot chocolate which is their specialty. “It tastes like cold hot chocolate!” he scoffed, making a face. Yes, H, that’s the point. He asked to order some ice cream while Sean and I were in mid-conversation and we half said “sure whatever.” Out came a monstrosity of a sundae in a huge goblet, a whole banana sticking out the side and giant Oreos stuck around the ice cream like a diabetic crown. Did he finish it? Hahaha you are so funny to ask that. No.

“Cotton Candy Unicorn Birthday Purple Monkey Dishwasher Von Pumpkin Chariot Waffles”

Sisters sharing? I must be dreaming, never wake me

After dinner the kids were all gunning to head over to Times Square. I’d rather spend the evening having my fingernails systemically pulled out one by one, but since it was Sawyer’s birthday, I acquiesced and told my brain to simply drift to a different realm for the next hour. The number of evil Mickey and Minnie Mouse’s and Elmo’s wandering around there are perhaps the most frightening. Of course all they want is to coerce you to take a photo, then get you to pay them for it. A few years ago I was walking through Times Square with both my daughters and suddenly I realized my older daughter was not with us. I turned back only to see her literally surrounded by these furry cretins, her face beyond scared and confused. I ran back to get her and for a second Elmo and Minnie wouldn’t stop putting their arms around her while chanting “Pho-to! Pho-to!” “No no no no no!” I said firmly. This is my no way phrase that I didn’t even know I had until it would get repeated by my kids. I say it by machine-gunning it out to shoot you down. “No photo! Get away from my daughter, Elmo!” Which is a phrase you don’t see yourself saying in your lifetime, but there you go. This time around, I noticed how incredibly lazy the people in the costumes had become. Everyone’s actual face was showing with their masks sitting on top of their head. Way to be creepy AND also ruin the magic of Disney and Sesame Street, assholes, I thought.   Suddenly we came upon an American Eagle Outfitters, and Birthday Girl was dying to go in. This idea wasn’t exciting me, but it was a chance to get out of the mega Jumbotrons, the gigantic suffocating crowd and the evil mascots. I hadn’t been to an American Eagle since I was in my early 20’s, tops, so I assumed the store guard would take my arm and firmly tell me in a voice that was quiet but could still be heard by anyone in the vicinity that I was too old to be gracing their doorstep. Instead, I walked into the multilevel store and was greeted by every fuzzy cozy comforting sweater shirt and pants I’d ever seen. I wanted to hate it but everything I saw I felt compelled to touch and utter ooooh and ahhhh so soft. When dropping off my kids at school, I had often looked around at the zombie-like high school kids, slowly making their way into the building, and marveled at how every day seemed to be Pajama Day. And now I understood it. The clothes at AE (yes I’m back to calling it that like the sassy teen I once was!) were tempting, but I settled on something even more juvenile: a pair of slippers that were giant dogs, their heads covered in towel turbans, their eyes with cucumber slices on them. I jumped up and down excitedly, feeling the teenage spirit rush back to me, and begged Sean to buy them for me. Somehow, it just didn’t seem right to buy them for myself…he slightly rolled his eyes, agreed, then stood in a long line of Gen-Z’ers holding a pair of spa dog slippers. I guess the man does love me. We left the store to head back through the Times Square throng and take the subway back to where we had parked. I looked over to my right and there was a homeless man huddled up under a blanket with his pitbull, the dog’s face looking out with eyes that almost appeared to have tears welling up in them. In my younger age, as a budding veterinarian, I was quite judgey when it came to homeless people keeping dogs as pets. You can’t really take care of yourself, why are you irresponsibly owning a living creature? Part of this was working at the emergency service at UPENN in west Philly and seeing all kinds of dogs not taken care of with various resultant medical conditions. But also part of this was a total lack of understanding and context of the whole vagrant situation and how certain people ended up that way. Not long ago, I went to the London Vet Show, a veterinary continuing ed conference in London on multiple subjects related to veterinary care. Quickly glancing through the program schedule, I saw a talk on Trauma and, being an ER vet, I decided that seemed like a good one, not bothering to read the description. When I arrived, I quickly realized it was not a talk on medical trauma but rather emotional trauma. The talk was run by a group called StreetVet, which is a London-based charity that provides free vet care for homeless peoples’ pets. They recognize that these pets are often the only “family member” or connection to another living being that these indigent people will know and their pets are usually truly their emotional support animals. As these people are some of the most emotionally traumatized people of all, they have used it as a model to study trauma-based care and how it can apply to anyone in the vet field. I found it compelling and emotional and, not to be too dramatic, paradigm-shifting.  Now, as I walked by this particular homeless man in Times Square, I was aware of all this past info and resultant softening thoughts and I felt something more akin to empathy than just sympathy as I looked over. And then I saw the sign the man had written on the cardboard he had displayed. It read: 

“PLEASE HELP, ANYTHING WILL HELP, THANK YOU”

Underneath that, it also read:

“BUT NO CHICKEN”

So…not anything, really, I thought. I had questions that rapidly came to me, such as: Are you a partial vegetarian? Perhaps you also have a chicken pet hiding under the blanket and can’t bear to eat its colleague in its presence? Are you allergic to chicken? Or more likely, you believe your dog is? Did you know that probably less than 10% of dogs actually have a chicken allergy?  All these thoughts came to me in those few seconds and I don’t think the homeless man would have appreciated any of these questions actually being asked of him. Nor would he have likely appreciated the leftover chicken tenders I was carrying around from Serendipity 3. I did also had some leftover Mac and cheese which did fall into both of the categories of ANYTHING and NO CHICKEN  but it was cold and hard and it seemed just as patronizing as it would have been to offer up my new spa dog slippers.  Long after we had gone onto the subway and piled back into our warm car and driven back to our warm little house in the Jersey suburbs, this man and his dog and his sign stuck with me. It’s a bit eye-opening and shameful to have that tiny initial gut reaction of “you’re homeless but refuse certain donated food?” But of course this is negating their equality as people. We don’t know the trauma this fellow human has suffered nor the circumstances of his life. Certainly it is worse than me having to endure walking around Times Square for an hour. I mean, for god’s sake, he lives there. We don’t know what landed this man in the part of NYC that makes us feel like there isn’t enough hand sanitizer in the world, under a blanket, without a home of his own, and to assume makes an ass out of you and me almost certainly. We can assume he loves his dog and could even imagine it may be his best friend. And that best friend could even be in that very minor percent of dogs who are, in fact, allergic to chicken. We certainly wouldn’t want to flare that condition and cause massive diarrhea under that blanket by forcing some $30 cold chicken tenders on him.  If I was a stray dog with a rare but real chicken allergy, I would want THIS man to huddle with me under a blanket. 

What do we learn from these “encounters”? What do we want our kids to know? We’ve taught them that as tempting as it is, giving some spare change to the homeless is not always the wisest choice. It’s about teaching empathy and then translating that into making a difference in truly impactful ways that don’t just satiate feelings of guilt or contribute unknowingly to an addiction. It’s about discussing gratitude and what we can act on locally to help those less fortunate and how ultimately that has a global effect. The biggest take-home from me when I heard the talk on trauma-based care was that we alleviate trauma when we support and empathize with each other and that translates to all parts of life, including being a parent. Sidebar: this can be hard when our kids are acting like selfish little assholes, but it’s what they need from us—empathy with a side of being checked and kept honest. So if this man with his dog, both homeless and probably hungry, decided to decline any offered chicken, we should teach our kids this is ok and his choice.  We should teach them that he is a human just like us, deserving dignity and our respect. Yes, to be fair his sign should have stipulated that from the beginning that he wasn’t willing to accept just “anything,” as some of us who are quite short on attention spans may not have read further and stupidly gifted him a chicken pot pie with a self-satisfed smile.   But he has every right to ask for what he wants. And he has every right to live with this dog, who might otherwise be stupidly fed chicken by some less competent or less loving owner. 

In the car on the way home I tried to explain these things to my kids and how my views have matured and become less myopic over time.  I talked about the importance of not judging another fellow human or placing any less value on someone just because their life circumstances have the appearance of supposed “less” dignity.” I tried to explain how so many people in this world are traumatized and it takes true empathy to bridge connections to each other, and this is vital to being a real and contributing part of the human race. They were quiet, maybe actually listening? and on some level, even if only for a moment, seemed to understand and feel a sense of gratitude for their own life situation.  That, or their eyes were simply glazed over wondering patiently when I would shut up and they could next check their cell phone.  Either way, you have to say these things outloud to them, right?  Hoping that by gradual osmosis they are more enlightened than you could have ever been at their age.  Wishing for baby steps and small wins.