Some might say it was a waste of time but where else can you see young guys tap dancing or learn how to carve a small block of wood into a cage with a ball inside or how to properly tie the strings on your sweat pants? The algorithm also shows me people in third world countries building things with next to nothing for tools and you’ll have to admit having that kind of knowledge tucked away in my brain could come in handy should the apocalypse ever come. I also get my share of sweetness and laughter in the form of kittens and puppies.
The second day I watched The Shorts, they turned me sniveling puddle of emotions that came after seeing twenty or so videos of several groups of young people living in different cities who go around giving out food, supplies and cash to homeless people. A deeper dive into what was going on brought me the story of how these twenty-something kids raise the money through an online app in exchange for uploading videos of them giving the money away. When one of the young guys approaches someone homeless he asks them if they need anything. Usually the homeless ask for food and then the young guy would say, “We’ll get you that but is there anything else you need?” The street people often mention gloves, blankets, shoes, socks or food for their dog or cat. One guy asked for a night in a hotel so he could get clean and another guy, who was trying to fix his rickety old bike, got a brand new bike and bag of food when all he asked for was a hamburger. A sweet old man said all he needed was someone to talk to and another wanted to borrow a phone to call his son.
It wasn’t just the meager and depressing way these people were living that got to me but rather how these videos humanized the homeless in a compassionate and respectful way. Many of them were holding back tears at the kindness shown them and as dirty and as ragged as these people looked one of young guys would always ask at the end, “Can I give you one more thing? Can I give you a hug or handshake? Your choice?” If I had a son doing what these young people are doing I’d be proud.
I did have a husband who was comfortable interacting with street people in a way I never was. We’d often come across them dumpster diving when we’d be out snowplowing parking lots in the middle of the night. They had their routes and we had ours. If it was a particularly cold night Don would offer to let them in his truck to warm up for awhile and I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t like his doing that. Where I saw danger, Don saw the human being beneath the hard luck. He wasn’t a religious guy by any stretch of the imagination but Don did believe in the proverb, “But for the grace of God it could be you or me.”
I did have a favorite street person, however. Don and I took a trip to Texas in '90s, traveling around the state in a John Steinbeck kind of vacation, hitting all the back roads and small towns and that's where we met an elderly woman named Miriam. We were walking our dog late at night and she was picking through people’s trash along the street and obviously hadn’t had a bath in a long time, a fact that made her an instant best friend to our dog and she was crazy about him as well as being just plain crazy. We got a lot of mileage out of retelling the highlights of that trip including Miriam liking us enough to share her Rule for Living: “Never, ever buy food,” she said with great fanfare. “People throw out enough to feed an army!” That ‘never, ever buy food’ would get repeated for years to come as Don and I would be walking into a grocery store.
When I was viewing The Shorts of the homeless I couldn’t help wondering how many of those people are mental ill and couldn’t hold down a job if ten jumped into their laps. Mental illness among the homeless didn’t scare Don the way it did me but he wasn’t above using the homeless to scare a couple of cocking teenage boys we had working for us one summer. They didn’t see the need stay in school and get an education. So one day Don took the boys downtown, parked the truck in full view of the line of homeless guys outside a mission and he left the boys there while he went inside to drop off a donation check. Don had a gift for gab and he didn’t come back out right away, giving the boys plenty of time to get nervous. They'd never been in that seedy part of town before and what followed on the way back to the suburbs was a not-so-subtle lecture on the important of getting an education.
Living into my eighties has both a strangeness to it and a familiarity to it. No matter what new things comes along they seem to relate back to something from my past like watching those The Shorts brought back memories of me tap dancing, of my dad building things and Miriam's Rule for Living.
But there is also uncharted territory in my eighties, of wanting to connect with others but being afraid to get to know them on a deeper level because in continuum care complexes like I live in no one moves for the same reasons we’ve lost neighbors or friends in the past. People here leave when their health deteriorates and they step down to a more intense level of care or they die. One of my favorite residents here moved to a Hospice room in another building recently and a parade of people have been going down to visit him, walking back and forth in front of my window with his future widow. At dinner last night my table mate said, “I wish I’d gotten to know him better” and I thought---but didn’t say out loud---I wish hadn’t gotten to know him. It makes the loss that much harder.
Uncharted territory or not, one thing I do know for sure is that no matter what happens to my mental or physical health or my bank account living in a continuum care complex makes the odds of me ever living on the streets next to zero and I am grateful for that. ©
