The Monkey and His Mother :: Personal Narrative Homeless Papers

The Monkey and His Mother My mother is always suspicious of panhandlers. She used to pull me closer whenever we'd encounter a begging homeless person on the subway and drop her eyes, focusing on the stray paper and chewing-gum medallions--blackened with soot of the city--that decorated the floor. She and my father frequently describe seeing a homeless man who begs in our neighborhood (claiming to have AIDS, and afflicted with a multitude of painful-looking sores) walking down a street near our house, dapper in a dark business suit, his face free of the blemishes that had covered his skin on other occasions. My father, also a self-professed cynic, believes in an inherent selfishness that motivates most human actions. "The tribal impulse is very strong," he says with a wry smile, as he gestures toward a newspaper article about nationalistic conflict. "People look out for their own interests." When I asked him about his experiences living through the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam war, I found that his involvement with each was limited--he vocalized support for the ideals of the former, and by 1969, disdain for the strategic incompetence represented by the latter--as he was occupied by his studies, and the desire to begin his career. My parents' cynicism spares no one. I remember my father's delight upon reading the book review for Christopher Hitchens's criticism of Mother Theresa, Missionary Position, Theory and Practice, in 1995. In the book, Hitchens cites Mother Theresa's apparently numerous, and highly self-interested exhibitions of decidedly unsaintly behavior. He describes her enormous--and entirely unaudited--wealth (Hitchens estimates one $50 million bank account to be only a "small portion" of her fortune) which she consciously kept outside of India--where she did most of her work--because the Indian government requires disclosure of foreign missionary funds. According to Hitchens, Mother Theresa received money from some dubious donors, including Savings and Loan swindler Charles Keating. Even despite her hefty fortune, the book asserts, Mother Theresa's treatment of the terminally ill was primitive and often completely ineffective. My father seized upon this exposition as a triumph of what he'd always known: no person should be considered angelic--most of us are equal parts good and evil, and, like most living creatures, we will all act on our own behalves most of the time. Neither I--a third-rate Mother Theresa at best--nor my sister was safe from the slings and arrows of my parents' pessimistic world-view.