Sue & Albert

When I met Sue (name changed for privacy) at the temporary winter shelter (hosted at another church down the street from ours) where I’ve been volunteering with some local church members over the past few weeks, I didn’t realize she was homeless. In fact, I think I even gave her a dirty look when she said something a little off color, assuming she was a volunteer from another local church. Realizing what I’d done (and that I should be kind to all people), I felt somewhat obliged to get to know Sue after that little mishap. I was worried that maybe she remembered my dirty look, but when I sat down with her to have dinner at the shelter a few nights later it seemed that she didn’t.

Over dinner we talked about how Sue used to be a teacher, about the possible careers she’d been thinking about pursuing now, how long she’d been at the shelter (a few weeks) and how it’s hard to focus when you’re not getting proper nutrition. It was such a friendly conversation that I found myself again forgetting that Sue was homeless and feeling more like I was having a coffee date with my middle-aged mentor who often forgot to take her reading glasses off when sipping her Java. And when we were finished, Sue stood up, made an offhand comment about farting and I could see then that her button up shirt was sloppily tucked into some sweat pants which were covered up to the mid-calf with white socks and paired with some flat dress shoes. I remembered again that Sue was homeless.

As I sat in my bathtub a few nights later (a place where I often ruminate) Sue came into my mind. The temporary shelter would be closing soon and as far as I knew Sue would have to go back to the streets.  And I was suddenly quite worried, “Where would Sue sleep?” I asked myself. “It won’t be safe for a middle-aged woman like that to be out on the street at night, someone could do something bad to her.” I’m not sure exactly why I hadn’t considered these problems before. I guess I figured that Sue had survived on the street before and she’d be able to do it again, but that was before I knew her. I was trying to explain this bathtub epiphany to a friend of mine, Adam, as we trotted along Spring Street downtown after a poetry reading. I pieced together fragments of how I was feeling until finally, I said, “Well, Adam, if you came to me and said, ‘I literally have no where to go, I’m getting kicked out of my apartment and I’m going to be sleeping outside now’ I’d have a serious problem on my hands.” And the fact of the matter is that I’d have that same serious problem if any of my friends told me they’d be sleeping on the streets. I’d tell them it’s not safe, I’d look for a place for them to stay, if worse came to worse, I’d put them on the floor of my studio apartment. So why had I managed to overlook the dangers Sue was facing until just now?

I think some of it has to do with this lie lurking in the back of my brain. It’s the rationale I used to separate myself from others like Sue and it goes something like this: Sue made mistakes and decisions that lead to her being on the streets (and in some sense, she is where she deserves to be). She’ll have to deal with the consequences of those mistakes and fix them when she’s ready. I would say there’s about 10% truth in that and 90% cultural lie. Did Sue make some bad choices? It’s likely, but does she deserve to be where she is? I doubt it. I had (yet another) epiphany about this situation. There’s a very thin line between Sue’s situation and mine – thinner than I previously thought. And I realize I may be oversimplifying a bit, but here’s how my brain’s been working this out based on my limited experiential evidence thus far.

I have another homeless friend, and for now we’ll call him Albert. I had a chance to hear more of Albert’s story this past week when we ate lunch together. Albert was adopted as a baby and moved from Southern California to Minnesota. His adoptive parents locked him in closets, starved him and abused him to the extent that his adopted mother’s sister demanded that she take Albert into her own family. Albert’s new parents (the sister and her husband) already had several children who worked with them on their family farm, but Albert had some health issues that kept him from being able to do that kind of work. One day when Albert was ten years old he got a shoelace caught in a vacuum cleaner when he was doing family chores and was punished for his mistake on two occasions. Like many free spirited children, Albert decided to run away. When the police took him back to his parents, they sent him away to a troubled youth program. From that time on Albert was shuffled around in the foster system and sent to several other youth programs and in the process got involved in some activities that led him down a dark road. He told me he was born in 1966, so he’s been stuck in a cycle of addiction and poverty for quite some time now. Albert loves to read, he’s very smart and has the wit of an academic. He was envious that my husband and I both have college degrees. He believed that with a few more opportunities he may have be sitting behind a desk at a university somewhere rather than bumming on Sunset Boulevard, where he said it was likely that he might end up dead.

I think Albert did make some mistakes, but I don’t think that he made any more serious than I did, at least not in the beginning. I tried to run away from home as a child, it didn’t land me in a center for troubled youth or in the foster care system when I was ten. I’ve been involved in activities I shouldn’t have been and I’ve been broke, but when these things happen, I call my mom or my sister or my grandma or my friends who have good jobs. I’m also lucky because I don’t have an addictive disease. And if I did I used the health insurance I’ve had my whole life to get help and people who love me would be there to walk me through treatment. I have safety net after safety net. So, after talking to Albert, I’m thinking that, yes, we are all responsible for our own actions, but we certainly don’t all deserve to be where we are – I know I don’t.

I don’t yet know what all this means. And in some ways I’d rather stop hanging out with people who are causing me to question why things are the way they are and, more importantly, why I’m okay with it.