So Clutch: Community Rocks
Humanity still exists
I’m one of those crazy people who goes to the grocery store every day. Inevitably, we need something. Like, even if we planned ahead, there’s still that one thing we’re going to need.
So I just don’t really plan. I have enough to juggle in my head, let alone what meal we *might* eat in three days. This practice of daily grocery shopping seems to lighten my mental load somehow. Also, it’s usually a nice little music infusion.
Where else am I going to hear Paula Abdul, Wilson Phillips or Ace of Base these days?
But while there, last night, I could barely speak. I was grateful for only needing a couple things, because anything more complex than the items we needed would have overwhelmed me. I was just…sad.
Just before going in, I had learned about proposed cuts to federal programs — including Medicaid — as part of a looming budget deal. And I felt the magnitude of those cuts, like, in my body. Because those cuts will really impact our country’s most vulnerable people, the ones who are barely getting by right now as it is — with the help.
“Like, what will happen to them when the help is no longer available?” I said to my husband, explaining my sudden silence in the store. “That’s what has me quiet. And sad.”
One of my kids was born on Medicaid, while I tried to manage living in an increasingly abusive marriage to a man I left in 2016. We were down to nothing, I was a high risk patient who needed special medication throughout my pregnancies and close monitoring as delivery neared. And we had no savings whatsoever.
We were living right on the edge of a financial cliff. So, Medicaid. And hearing it could experience cuts to finance tax cuts for the wealthy, even after the administration promised it wouldn’t, turned my stomach.
Medicaid was a lifeline for me and Lulu, seen below doing the cutest rendition (in the history of renditions) of the Pledge of Allegiance.
That’s when I remembered my conversation with Tricia Arce. She owns a dessert shop around the corner from my house called Toasted Mallow. And she is a reminder — a frosted and sprinkled beacon — that humanity still exists.
People care, even though the guy running our country doesn’t. Individual people still do.
I wrote a bit about her in a previous newsletter before getting the chance to connect with her. I wanted to learn more about how she was able to help a man who was looking for odd jobs to pay his bills. She had asked her social media followers to help him out, and they totally did, sending money directly to her personal Venmo.
He needed $200. They raised more than triple that for him.
“He was crying and he was very grateful for what we did for him,” Arce said.
But, here’s what got me. People just trusted her and sent money along to her Venmo? I figured it had gone through a GoFundMe or something like that. But no. Venmo.
They trusted her because she had earned their trust previously with someone her followers came to know as the “Cupcake Kid,” a boy who would pop into Toasted Mallow while walking home from school on blazing hot Phoenix afternoons.
When he came in, he’d simply ask for a cup of water. School in Phoenix starts in late July, for some blasphemous reason, so that means kids are walking home from school or bus stops in temperatures that are usually at or above 110 degrees.
“He’d stop in every day,” Arce said. “He made my day because he was always so positive.”
At one point she offered him a free cupcake, and from there he earned that nickname. When she decided to raise money for this kid, her followers pitched in more than $1,000 dollars. And when that money was spent on him — for a haircut and clothes and new shoes — she made sure her followers knew where it was going.
Now the “Cupcake Kid” works for her, washing dishes three times a week. So when this other gentleman was in need, her followers trusted that their donation would go to him.
“I think because of the other story is why people trusted me,” she said.
Once I came across this story, I went through Toasted Mallow’s social media feed to learn more about the business and see if I could find more information about this man she helped. While scrolling, I came across a video Arce posted about the challenges of being a small business owner, especially in the culinary space where margins are razor thin.
She even held up her profit and loss statement for the previous year in that video and encouraged viewers to look at it, so they would understand how difficult it is to become profitable.
It struck me that as she discusses the financial difficulties she faces as a small business owner, she is out trying to alleviate the financial stresses others are facing. But that’s what empathy is, right?
Walking in those shoes with someone.
“I have a roof over my head and I got what I need and I want my business to be successful and I have employees to make sure I need to pay and at the end of the day, there are people who have it worse off than I do. I can’t see that happen and not help out where I can,” Arce said. “People came through. I have a good community.”
To add a cherry on top of this whole intervention with the man in need, Arce learned of a plot twist when she went to write a check for the donated money. She had always just called him “dad” in their previous interactions because he reminded her of her own dad. She never knew his name.
When he told her his name, she couldn’t believe it. He shared the same name as her dad. And her brother, two men whom she began building relationships with over this past year.
“This last year has been a whole year of stars aligning and things happening,” she said. “We still have to remember humanity. I think we’ve lost that.”
*If you want to see the video she shared about this story, here’s a link. Also, go support her business. We all could use a sweet treat for surviving the stuff we’re surviving.
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Why am I sharing this story? Because, a story like this gives me hope.
I remember hearing, after one disaster or another — be it a terrorist attack, a flood, a hurricane or an F5 tornado — that hope is found in the helpers. “Look for the helpers” is what someone said, or something like that.
The helpers offer hope because they’re a reminder of humanity.
Sometimes, we need those reminders. Things can get heavy or nasty or just…wrong. I wrote about how to manage what certain types of people say a few weeks ago. Certain types of people being abusers and those elected to the highest office in the most powerful country in the world.
And it struck me that I never got to consider how to manage what those same type of people do.
Feeling helpless isn’t going to work. It’s why I’m hoping that small doses of good will. When I was younger, and still now, I’d refer to that kind of help as “So clutch.” It drives my husband crazy, because I think he’d never heard the phrase before, he believes it is a car part exclusively, and he didn’t think anyone else used it.
But people do. I’ve heard it. So I’m using it for this. And, I’m committed to looking for the helpers and sharing those stories here.
Because we just might need it. And hope doesn’t really overflow. So, I’ll keep filling that cup the only way I know how. By writing about it.
Do you know of someone or some organization sprinkling good around? Doing something that comes in So Clutch? Is it something more people need to know about? Tell me! We all need more of it right this minute, and for the foreseeable future.
Send me your good stuff, the stuff that is So Clutch at lisawritesaboutit@gmail.com.