There's a quote on the Holocaust memorial in Boston that hits me in the chest every time:
Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present to me that night on a leaf.
Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry and you give it to your friend.
—Gerta Weissman Klein
I met a woman a couple of months ago. She's twenty-seven, from Sudan, and she's been without a home for about a year. She's sharp, present, entirely herself; she sleeps in an abandoned car. We met when I gave her some money, the way people do, and I didn't think much of it. I spent 15 minutes or so chatting with her. Later that same day I saw her again, and she had used some of what I'd given her to buy me flowers. She said I was the only person who'd made her feel human in three weeks — which startled me, because plenty of people give her money. The money, it turned out, was not the thing.
A few weeks later I saw her out early, around seven in the morning, hours before she usually turns up. Something was off; I could feel it. We talked for a while, and I asked if she wanted to get breakfast. We found a café, sat down, ordered. And when the time came, she insisted on paying.
I want to be honest about the moment, because everything is in it. My whole instinct was to refuse. Every cell of me had been trained, since childhood, to wave the offer away — no, no, please, let me — to prove I didn't need anything, to keep myself on the giving side of the ledger where it felt safe. A woman who sleeps in a car was reaching across the table to buy my eggs, and the trained reflex was to stop her.
I didn't stop her. I let her pay.
I didn't fully understand what had happened until later, talking it through, when someone said the obvious thing I couldn't see: that was the raspberry. And I lost it. I sat there and cried in a way I hadn't managed to cry about much larger and older things, because the thing had finally found the soft place it was looking for.
Here is what I think broke open. I had spent my whole life on the giving side, where it felt safe. She offered me the one thing I’d been trained out of: the chance to receive, from someone who had every reason to hold on to what little she had, and didn’t.
I’ve known so many people who had plenty and lived as though they had nothing. She had nothing and gave as if she had everything.
One raspberry, on a leaf, across a café table.