Widows and Homeless People

It amazes me sometimes, the things some people assume about others they don’t know very well. Recently an acquaintance---when she found out I don’t have any children---said to me, “I’ll bet you really enjoy giving your nieces and nephew gifts. A childless friend of mine,” she went on, “sends her nieces and their families on nice trips every year. Do you do things like that?”

“Well, no,” I replied. “I’m more security conscious than that. I’m more concerned about having enough money to take care of myself until I die, since no one else is legally or morally obligated to do it. When I’m gone then they can have what’s left.”

“That’s interesting,” the woman said before we both got distracted by the speaker we’d come to hear.

Interesting? What the heck did that mean? Was I deemed a selfish aunt who, unlike her friend, doesn’t want to see the “young’un” enjoy themselves in Hawaii on my dime? Well, excuse me, but I’d rather make sure I don’t have to eat cat food or live in a cardboard box in the last few years of my life. Interesting? I can’t get that word out of my head. The mating habits of octopus are interesting. The way gravity works is interesting. But a middle class widow who doesn’t want to give away her nest egg is just using boring, old common sense.

I thought about this odd conversation today on my way home from a Red Hat Society work day where we packed dozens of plastic shoeboxes for homeless veterans---throw-away razors, socks, gloves, hats, tooth brushes and paste, tissues, Wipes, crackers and cheese, hand cream, jerky sticks, fingernail files, paper and pens, waterless hand cleaner, puzzle books, combs, etc. etc. What a scary and unpleasant thing it must be to live on the streets, especially in the dead of winter. I thank the gods of good medical insurance for the fact that I’m not living out of a shopping cart. When I was hanging around the stroke and language disorders support communities I heard plenty of horror stories from people who lost everything when their health went south.

Back to the suburbs and our nice, warm houses. Packing the shoeboxes was actually a crazy kind of fun. We collected a mountain of stuff between the 18 ladies who showed up for the work party. And I was enormously relieved to learn that people from a veteran’s affairs office will be distributing the boxes for us. I couldn’t quite picture myself all dressed up my Red Hat garb--- red coat, purple beads and broad brimmed hat that would catch in wind---crawling underneath snowy viaducts looking for homeless men, or going down to the soup kitchen at line-up time and trying to sort the homeless veterans out from the rest of men without walls and windows to call their own. And why do we discriminate in the first place? Is there a pecking order among the homeless that I don’t know about? Sadly, I suppose there is.

After our box packing work was done, a few of the ladies got to talking about the movie, Last Vegas, and how much they enjoyed it. The storyline is about four old dudes who decide to “stop acting their age and relive their glory days” according to IMDb. (Don’t you just love how IMDb can sum up an entire movie with so few words?) Anyway, the next thing I knew someone was looking up the movie schedule on their smart phone and making plans to see it on the way home. I want to see the movie badly but I was afraid of the fog that was rolling in and the distance I’d have to drive in it after the movie let out, so I passed on the opportunity to tag along. But I like how this group of ladies roll. ©