Granted, a large bag of apples isn’t adequate payment for a day’s work.

However  this is where the great fork in the road occurs. The one between what matters most and what matters less:

The man who received the bag of apples cannot read, cannot write and manages nothing but the most basic of basic language skills in French. Still, he keeps afloat, along with his family, albeit on the slimmest ledge left above the precipice.

One of the many traits I’ve observed in him in the four years of our association: he must reciprocate. You give him something, he needs to give you something in return.Maybe you don’t need what he gives you, maybe you look at it with surprise or irony, but give he must. And if you’re a half-decent human, you accept with thanks.

At his previous temporary shelter when the lodger invited us to a meal, he pulled out those bits of food he had and added them to the generous offerings on the table. Last night, he insisted on sharing the apples with his current lodgers and myself because, what is a man if he must always receive and can’t give something to others?

He and his family are on the slimmest of ledges with all kinds of handicaps tacked on to their dire situation. That’s life. But  life hands him a bag of apples? He shares. He’ll move on to another shelter soon. Still waiting for the administrative answer that will shove him off the cliff, or give his family a respite.

The title? The last line in a French joke that begins with a man having an accidental fall out of a very tall building. As he sails by the twenty-fifth floor, a man opens the window and shouts: “How’s it going?” The falling man yells back: “Going great as long as it lasts.”

Here, have an apple. Picked off the tree no later than yesterday.