Think of one of those round plastic sand-sifters that children love to play with at the beach. Make it red plastic and call it American society. Now think of a giant grinning child, his bare flesh encrusted
with sand, shaking the sifter with the catastrophic vigor of unemployment, divorce, addiction, illness, poverty. And watch who falls out. Watch who loses his or her home, possessions, and grip on the prevailing notion of American life.
I remind myself that it could be me.
In San Francisco, there are plenty of reminders. Along the Embarcadero where visitors wait to board cruise ships to Alcatraz and Sausalito, or stroll Fisherman’s Wharf to buy plates of Dungeness crab and watch the mimes and musicians, there are men and women sitting on the sidewalk, their backs braced against shop walls. Young, old, ageless--they do not look up into the faces of passers-by. Often, they have spread out a jacket or a cloth on the pavement, and set there a cup or soiled cap intended to collect donations. Some have signs that they prop beside the collection cup: “I won’t lie. It’s for beer,” reads one sign. “God help me, I need to eat,” reads another.
The sympathy I feel for these people is not naive. I recognize them as neither noble nor loathesome, but as desperate. Were I desperate in this way, I would feel humiliated by my condition. I would feel lonely for the company of others. I would feel a gnawing, abiding fear that nothing was ever going to be okay again.
My sympathy is measured by my understanding of what I or anyone would be willing do in desperation, so my encounters with people who live on the street have always been cautious and brief. A woman pushing a shopping cart lined with cardboard and filled with her earthly belongings stops me to ask for a dollar. I give her two and walk on. A man wearing worn boots laced with knotted tooth floss stops me to ask for a cigarette. I give him one, lend him my lighter, and walk on. I meet few such desperate people in my home town, but I meet many in the places I visit--cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. If I lived in San Francisco, where encounters with street people are daily events, I would carry with me food--high protein energy bars and oranges.
It’s what I would want: an fresh orange, a smile, a word or two about the weather. “Do you have a dog?” a man asked me once as he slipped the dollar I’d given him into his shirt. An orange, a smile, a word or two about the companionship of dogs. And I have the privilege of walking on.
In San Francisco on a recent visit, I rode a public bus up Market Street toward the Ferry Building. Market Street is wide, clotted with traffic, and lined with towering skyscrapers and people moving along the sidewalks--many, many of them people who live on the street, sleep in doorways, eat from dumpsters. As the bus coughed to a stop at Fremont Street, I looked out the window and watched a young man rummage through a curbside trash barrel. He was slender and wore stained brown slacks that hung in folds from his waist. His blond hair was curly and darkened with street oil and exhaust fumes. His forehead creased in concentration, and he rushed as he dug into the rubbage. And suddenly, he stopped--his face softened by something as smooth as joy--and he lifted from the filth a teddy bear. The teddy was armless and the color of ashes, and the young man hugged it to his narrow chest, and kissed its gray face over and over and over.
The bus pulled away.
That same week, I stood in front of the Mission Dolores in the Mission District. My daughter had gone inside with a tour group, and I waited on the sidewalk to listen to salsa music drifting from no where and to have a cigarette. I was alone on the sidewalk except for a busdriver sitting half a block away inside a tall, double-decker tour bus. As I stood studying the heavy wood doors in the arch of the mission entrance, I heard a voice approach and address me. I turned to find a man about my own age, tall, his skin reddened and chafed by weather, an open cut over his eyebrow, his auburn hair hanging from beneath a brimmed hat nearly to his shirt pocket. He wore two sweat-darkened jackets, despite the heat of that day; a length of rope held up his trousers, and he had a knapsack slung over his shoulder. I expected him to ask for a cigarette. Instead, he said, “I love your hair.” Apprehensive, I turned and moved up the block toward where the busdriver sat. The man followed, saying to me, “How do you get it like that?”
My hair is white, unusually white. Many people comment on my white hair. It’s become a sort of conversation opener, much like saying to a stranger, “How about those Lakers?” or “Hot enough for you?” And here was a man who could fit all of his clothes in a knapsack, making the most ordinary and human of comments. “It’s natural,” I told him, and since I had no food, I offered him a cigarette.
Say that I suffer from liberal guilt. Say that it is easy to feel magnanimous while visiting distant cities. But, for the sake of all of us, the next time you meet a person who lives on the street, recognize him or her as a human being complete with the needs we all have for courteous exchange. Meanwhile, take a look at a website called “54 Ways You Can Help The Homeless.” The site is a hyperbook written by Rabbi Charles A. Kroloff, Senior Rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in Westfield, New Jersey. Rabbi Kroloff's synagogue sponsors a shelter for homeless people. On his pages, you will find statistics that dispel myths about the people who live on the streets of America, and suggestions offered to all of us for ways that we can help.
54 Ways You Can Help The Homeless
Originally published in Tapestry, July 2001
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