Homeless, homeless, Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake – Paul Simon
This is the alcove between our house and the building next door. Our neighbor has been here for a couple of months now and we have to figure out what to do. This being San Francisco, we are all – to varying degrees – terribly uncomfortable with the decisions tied to such a situation.
For a long time those of us who were most uneasy hoped we could just let him stay. We live right at a busy bus stop though, and there’s a 4-year-old upstairs from us and a preschool across the street. And I remember…
We lived in Manhattan, on Broadway and 79th St, in 1970’s and 80’s, when the city, and many of its inhabitants, were broke. Homeless New Yorkers were placed in “welfare hotels” – beat-up old places nobody wanted; there were 3 or 4 of those within blocks of our building. An island with trees and some greenery divided the uptown/downtown sides of Broadway. Many lost souls slept there too, especially where we were, above 72nd St. – and on the sidewalks and benches.
Once after school, when my older son was around five, we stepped off the bus on Amsterdam Ave, right outside PS 87’s playground, to find ourselves two steps from a man sleeping on the sidewalk next to the playground fence, his penis hanging out of his pants. Other times the men (they were mostly men) suffered serious mental illness, yelling at voices none of the rest of us could hear.
Because the circumstances were so troubling, we worked to find ways for our kids to feel even a little bit empowered to help. They always wanted to offer money. We asked, if they did want to help, that they provide food, since so many just bought alcohol with spare change. They did this often – buying a bagel or some juice at one of the neighborhood bodegas and passing them on. We also got involved with Paul Simon’s Children’s Health Fund, which sends medical vans and doctors to New York’s underserved neighborhoods. In the 80’s the vans spent much of their time at family shelters and welfare hotels. Our younger son chose it as his portion of family donations for years. No effort, however, eliminated the fear.
We’d be walking through the discount stores on the Lower East Side and there would be a couple of homeless guys outside a door or on the corner. I’d feel a little hand move into mine and, usually, squeeze pretty hard. My husband, who worked in inner city medicine, always said “Don’t forget, they won’t hurt you; if you blew on them they’d fall over” but that information was only partly successful. No matter how much they understood, no matter how much compassion they felt, many of these people scared them.
In other words, my personal experience with my own kids slams into my sense of that old Greater Good. I know that a little kid getting scared once in a while is nothing compared to the ordeal the man next door faces every day but I keep remembering those small hands reaching out to mine and what I know remains, however faintly, from those daily encounters. I know, too, that I’m partly hiding behind the interests of the lovely little boy upstairs and the school across the street. Social services are limited by budget, so I’m reluctant to act and struggling to figure out what I think we should do. No ending here – ending to come.