The Man That Lives in the Trees.

Today my mom and I made a deal. We're going to use what we have to help other people. We don't have that much, and life hasn't always been kind to us, but it's been even worse to others. This happened today we were on our way to Walmart when a homeless man walked past us on the street.

The next thing we knew we running through Walmart, buying sandwich meat, bread, and soda. We got in our car and drove back and forth until we found the scarily skinny man we'd seen walking down the street. He was walking to his home. A group a small trees down a hill.

"Hey! Come here!" I shouted out of the window, desperate to make him hear me, "Come here!"

He turned around when he heard me and walked over to our car quickly.

"Hi," I breathed, "We have extra groceries," I told him, "Do you want them?"

And what he said next made me cry. "Only if you have extra," he said, not wanting to deprive us of anything, even though it was so obvious that he was the one who had nothing.

"We have sandwich stuff and pop, is that alright?" I told him, already handing him the bags out of the window.

"Yes," he said quickly, "I like your metallic things." He grabbed the bags. "Thank you, thank you."

I smiled and thanked him for the compliment about my lip rings. We wished him a good weekend and watched him walk down the hill to the trees quickly, holding the food in the bags. This retelling of the experience makes it seem so quick, but when I was giving him the groceries, time seemed to slow down.

I was crying and shocked by how polite he was. I was completely shocked by the fact that he didn't want to "deprive" us of anything even though we'd be fine without it. He didn't want to take our food if we needed it, even though it was obvious that we'd didn't need it as much as him. We went back to Walmart and I cried quite a few times, completely shocked by his politeness and his decency towards us.

That's when Mom and I decided that we needed to do that more often. So now we're going to help a homeless person twice a month. That's all we can afford for now, but when I'm older and have more money, I hope to completely change someone's life. Right now, I wish I could pull that genuinely nice man from the trees and put him in a nice house with a warm bed, but I can't. So we're going to try and look out for the person/people in the trees, because we have more than him and then maybe someday, some who has more than us will help us when we truly need it.

I can't wait to help feed someone again. I can't wait to help him again. I'm both saddened and happy because of this experience. Sad because I can't do more, but happy because I've done a little.