Blank Check: The Spoils of Victory

Before I left Montreal, I went on a date with a scientist I’d met on the bus back from Boston. Technically I met him in line, where I learned he was from Maine. Then we boarded, and after the obligatory thirty minutes of silence and pretend-sleeping had elapsed I tricked him into playing a game I sometimes play with ill-fated strangers called the Question Game.

Players of this game tend to learn a lot more about each other than the peculiar rules of the first encounter typically allow. On top of this, our seven-hour journey was extended by unusual circumstances into a ten-hour journey. Suffice it to say that by the time we found ourselves standing outside the Montreal bus station at eleven o’clock at night, it was impossible to deny the strangeness of our sudden intimacy. He asked if he could take me to dinner sometime. I said yes.

By the time we actually got around to having dinner, it was two weeks later and he was in an exuberant mood. He had just sold a scientific discovery, had had the final meeting with the lawyers that day, and it was time to celebrate. He took me to a tiny seafood restaurant in the Old Port, where he convinced the hostess to seat us even though they had stopped seating, and we sat in a corner booth that was literally cut into stone. We ordered oysters and paella and many exorbitantly priced drinks. At the end I snuck a peak at the bill and nearly wet myself.

His place was just around the corner, so I agreed to come up for a nightcap. While he was slicing a lime I spied a chessboard.

“You play?” I asked.

“I’m not very good,” he admitted.

“In that case,” I said, “let’s make a bet.”

“Ok. What are the terms?”

Now, I’ll preface this by saying that money has never been a big motivator in my young and relatively idealistic life. But I decided then, on a whim, to make it interesting.

“Let’s say,” I said slowly, “that the loser has to write the winner a blank check.”

“A blank check?” He frowned. “For how much?”

I smiled. “It’s blank. You don’t know until it’s cashed.”

He mused. I set up the pieces, allowing him the first move. When they were ready, he agreed. We discussed the terms: the check had to go toward the purchase of a single thing, and the loser had to be notified of what that thing was. We shook hands, and the game commenced.

We weren’t even ten moves in when he took my Queen. I winced – it was such a rookie mistake. I wondered briefly as to the number that would make my check bounce. But luckily the fates intervened; half an hour later he was cornered, with no viable allies in sight. My rook and bishop were bearing down on his undefended King. And, to his credit, he was smiling.

“I can’t see any way out of this,” he said.

“That’s unfortunate,” I said, thinking how fortunate it was.

And he tipped his king. The game was won.

He didn’t waste any time. He whipped out his checkbook. Didn’t have to ask how to spell my last name. Signed with a flourish. He even post-dated the check until after payday. I’ll admit that there was something very sexy about that blank check, sitting there on the board amidst the endgame, redeemed after a most fatal first mistake.

Since that day, I’ve had many conversations about whether and to what end to cash the check. I’ve listened to many divergent opinions, ranging from “buy a car” to “cashing it at all makes you a bad person” to “anyone who’s seen the movie knows you have to build a water slide.” In the end I decided not to cash it, but to keep it as a memento, and as punctuation for the end of a most unbelievable story.

Then the other day I began to reconsider, when a friend suggested I use it to make a donation. I’ll admit that being a student of development has made me a skeptic of most charities; the reality is that many NGO’s, despite the best intentions, waste lots of money on unsustainable projects that fall apart once the organization withdraws. And financial donations have always irked me, because you have no way of knowing what your dollars actually accomplished. For all you know the money you thought was making a difference somewhere was actually used to print pamphlets soliciting more donations. Congratulations! You’ve managed to kill more trees.

Then another friend reminded me of Heifer International, an organization that gives the gift of livestock to families in the developing world. I’ve made small contributions to this organization in the past, as Christmas gifts to my family; a hive of honeybees in honor of my sister the beekeeper, that kind of thing. Each animal provides food and income in some way (for example, the heifer namesake can produce up to four gallons of protein-rich milk a day) and the families can use this income to send their kids to school. On top of this, each gift multiplies because each family promises to pass on the offspring and knowledge of their animal to another family in their village.

So I was poking around on their website, and found a special project they have going on in Rajasthan. It immediately caught my eye, not only because it’s in India, but also because it’s directed at women. I probably don’t have to say that women in India are dealt a really shitty hand, especially in rural areas. And if there’s one thing that I still believe in after being so thoroughly disillusioned with development, it’s that of all the myriad issues that plague the developing world, the empowerment of women is the most pressing – precisely because of the ripple effect it has on other important areas. For example, when women have a source of income independent of their husbands, they are more likely to spend it on the health and education of their children. I could talk for days about how important female empowerment is for the state of the world.

The project pledges to provide the women of two hundred families in rural Rajasthan (which is a desert, where half of all children are malnourished) with three dairy goats each (goats survive well in deserts). The goats produce milk for consumption and sale, and their manure can be used as fertilizer in a harsh environment. Goats often have up to three baby goats a year, so the gift multiplies like crazy.

The project is estimated to cost about $150,000. Of that, more than $140,000 has already been raised. Now, if I were ever going to cash the check at all, I was thinking it would probably be for less than a hundred dollars. But I learned about this project, and promptly wrote an enormous email to the check’s issuer requesting that he consider donating the outstanding $9,187 (which looked, in my eyes, like an absurd number). Beyond the uncertainty as to whether or not he was in the financial position to make such an outrageously large donation, I had no idea, even after ten hours of conversation and one very pleasant date, if these issues were ones that he would care about. But, as a wise friend once told me, you don’t get what you don’t ask for. So I hit send.

And last night I heard back from him. He said it was good to hear from me, and that he had been very curious to see what I would do with the spoils of victory. Unfortunately, while his business was doing well, he was in the middle of filing patents and funding the first leg of manufacturing. My heart began to sink.

But then I kept reading, about how a deal is a deal, and I’m entitled to use the check for whatever ends I so decide, and he’d spent the weekend thinking about what he’s capable of doing now and in the future…

In the end, he told me to save the check as a keepsake. And, he proposed, he would donate $100 every month to this project, until he is in the position to make the larger donation I requested. He would like to put it under my name, and give them my e-mail address so that I can see it happening, and would this be satisfactory to me?

Would this be satisfactory to me?