Take the Risk to Trust

Cincinnati skyline, photo by author

I saw him lay down on the sidewalk from a distance as my three friends and I were searching for a Starbucks to caffeinate our day of touristy plans in Cincinnati. I thought he was trying to get a good angle to fix a broken chair outside the convenience store. I glanced over at him as we approached. He was flat on his back, staring straight up in the air, eyes wide. Not fixing chairs at all. “Are you okay?” I asked. “No!” He said. “Should I call 911?” “Yes,” he said. I started to dial. He was bald. His teeth were yellow and crooked. A prominent front tooth was missing. His pants were secured below his hips with a belt. “I’m a diabetic,” he said. “Are you low?” I asked him. “Do you need sugar?” I started to talk with the 911 dispatcher as Karen ran into the convenience store. I noticed that he was wearing a hospital bracelet, and I used the information on it to answer the dispatcher’s questions. Karen emerged with juice and skittles which he awkwardly and gratefully ate from sidewalk. “Is he combative? Does he have a weapon?” The dispatcher’s questions embarrassed me. “No, it’s nothing like that!” I said, while mentally noting a small knife poking out of his pocket. “He’s sick. He’s wearing a hospital bracelet.” Someone suggested that he’s had or might have had a seizure. Did he say that or was that one of my friends? I’m suddenly distracted by Karen who squatted down and gently placed her purse underneath his head like a pillow.

Later, as we’re sipping our beers and waiting for our lunch, Tess commented on how wonderful Karen was to put his head on her purse. Downright Christ-like. “Please don’t ever do that again,” I said. Karen said, “I just didn’t want him to seize and bang his head on the concrete.” Right, I didn’t want that either.

I trusted him when he said he was a diabetic because he was wearing a hospital bracelet. Clearly, he was sick. Maybe he had been released from the hospital too early, or maybe without the family support he needed to stay well. I trusted that this man needed help, but I didn’t trust him enough to put my purse underneath his head. 

There is always risk in trusting. How much should I trust a stranger? How much risk does it make sense to run? I hadn’t considered the risks the dispatcher alluded to. I had zero plan if that pocket knife I failed to mention were to become a weapon. My friends and I were on vacation, with just the barest outline of an itinerary for the day. All we were risking was time on a lazy Saturday morning. And $2.99 for the juice and Skittles. This seemed a small price to pay if our trust turned out to be misplaced. 

I want to live—and I want my kids to live—in a community that takes care of each other. For the most part, we do. Lili’s mom lent my daughter appropriate shoes when I dropped her off unprepared for a field trip I forgot about. We took Mel to the county fair when their parents needed a break. Elisabeth kept our kids and helped them grieve when my husband and I took the dog for his final trip to the vet. We kept Zumi while her mom was at a big job interview. We take care of people and people take care of us. The world runs on trust. 

Still. I temper the optimism for my kids to keep them safe. When I got a nasty message from someone I don’t know on twitter censuring me for not talking to him, I called my daughter over and had her read the message. Is this person my friend? Does he have my best interests at heart? Should I talk to him? Should I feel bad because he says he thought I was a better person than this? Should I trust him? (No, no, no, no, and no.) 

“Yes,” I said to the 911 dispatcher. “He’s conscious. He’s talking to us.” 

“You have beautiful toes,” he said to Katie. She moved them a bit further from his face. “I want to suck your toes. Do you want me to suck your toes? You have a beautiful body.” 

“You need to stop saying that stuff,” I said. 

“I like her body!” Vigor has returned to his voice. I supposed the sugar was working. “You can’t make me not like her body!”

“You like whatever you want,” I said, “but you keep those thoughts in your heart.” He returned to moaning. Huh. Maybe a little combative. “Who dropped you off from the hospital?” It was his granddaughter. Katie tries to call her. In the confusion of trying to understand the phone number, made harder by the moaning and not knowing the area code in Cincinnati, I lose focus and start to look around. We are right in front of a convenience store. Why is the clerk seemingly ignoring this? There are police cars across the street. No one is in them, but why didn’t the police see this and help him. Where are they? Why are people allowing this man to have an emergency on the street? Where is the social safety net?

Trust and the connections we have with other people form an informal social safety net for us. We weave this safety net in the places we gather—bars, libraries, places of worship, county fairs, potlucks, our homes. This safety net looks like the neighbor who dropped off banana bread and jam to cut through the isolation of the pandemic, or the parents who worked together to form a remote schooling pod, or the one family you knew who still had power during the ice storm and invited you over to shower and charge your devices. Trusting our neighbors forms the safety net that would help you if you were having a medical emergency on the street and the police and shops hadn’t noticed.

The fire truck arrived. “Let’s check your blood sugar,” I heard. My friends and I went inside the store to talk the clerk into letting us wash our hands. When we returned from the employees-only washroom, the EMT was talking to the clerk. “You don’t have to let him in here,” I heard. “Yeah, he’s already not allowed in.”

“Is he okay?” I asked. “Oh, yeah,” the EMT said. “We see him just about every day. He’s not diabetic. He’s drunk and fooling around.”

“You see him everyday?” I repeated. “What do you mean he’s not diabetic? He has a hospital bracelet on!” 

“I know.” He looked me straight in the eye. “He’s not diabetic.” 

Trusting strangers is a part of our lives, and it brings out the humanity in ourselves and in others. Trust comes with risk, and sometimes we end up on the wrong side of that risk. But, it’s worth it to transform ourselves into people who look for the good in others, make decisions that take others’ safety into account, and value the needs of the community in addition to our own preferences. Trust transforms neighbors into a social safety net and makes the whole community safer. This is a hard and polarized time, but, maybe, we are all just doing the best we can with what we have, such as it may be. Even the man writhing on the ground with fake diabetes and sexually harassing my friend.

We ended our day of touristing at Graeters ice cream. We took our treats outside and found a table in the shade in Fountain Park. We admired the giant, ornate fountain. A Stone Temple Pilots tribute band was setting up in the park. We considered what time of the evening it would be when we would next find ourselves hungry enough to try the famed Skyline Chili. We started our walk back to our car just as the band started to play. Right up front, close to the stage, dancing and swaying broadly to the music was a man. Bald, pants belted below his hips, arms outstretched. Grooving. With a hospital bracelet on his wrist.