The Wages of Sin - A Lenten Tale

This morning, I went out to sample the new breakfast served by Wendy's. En route I was breaking for the light at Wasatch and Platte when I saw what looked to be a young girl on the corner waiting to cross. When I pulled to a stop, I noticed that it was a man with long hair and he was sitting not standing. And he was sitting on the curb in shabby attire clutching a thin crocheted afghan about his shoulders. He appeared to be nodding, or shifting from time to time. And then before the light changed he stopped moving, perhaps settled in.

As I turned into the Wendy's parking lot, I saw paramedics leaving Wendy's to climb into their ambulance which faced the sad figure. They got in, belted up, and drove away. Not seeing him at all, or perhaps simply not caring. From my seat in Wendy's where I ate in relative comfort I could see him across Platte from me. Still, sitting, feet in the gutter, head hunched forward hiding his face and his beard. I worried that he could fall forward and into traffic. I worried because he was likely not asleep but either on drugs or alcohol or both. I worried if I should do anything. Should I go to the 7-eleven which was behind him and get him coffee and something to eat. Should I talk to him? Should I take him somewhere? If so, then where?

My worry was eased by a pair of twenty-somethings that stopped and sat by him, trying to talk to him, but then they just went their way, continuing to walk down Platte. The world passing by in the form of dogs being walked, people on bikes, the ever present traffic, and my eyes that kept going back to him and my thoughts along with my stares. This worry and growing concern did not hasten my meal or make it impossible to continue reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Echo. No, I finished at my normal pace and even refilled my drink before leaving.

Still, the man was locked in my thoughts. I drove my car not home but over to the Marian House - the Catholic Charities building that fed and helped the all too many homeless in our city. Though the parking lot held several homeless men standing or sitting about, their possessions in hand/cart/backpack, the place was not open. I turned myself and my thoughts then to the police, the guardians of the peace.

The police station downtown was not far so I went there instead of calling. The officer working as attendant behind the thick bulletproof glass gave me a non-emergency number to call and ask for a wellness check. Which I did, in the process of which I gave a description of personage and condition. They promised to dispatch an ambulance and firetruck to check on the man. Which they did. I verified this on the way home as I pulled up to the same stop light but driving in the opposite direction. I witnessed uniformed men question and probe the homeless man. When the light turned green, I held back my tears and took it as tacit permission that I could go home.

I am an observer in both my work and my passion to writing and thought. Being an observer carries wages much as the sinner does. The wages of the observer for my part are often in the coinage of guilt. I may also be accumulating more than my share of sin because isn't doing the bear minimum or often nothing at all a sin of omission? What I did today was something at least, but it amounted to turning a problem over to someone else. So here I sit in confession to those who may read this. It is a confession without expectations of absolution. It is not made in a church. It is not made before a priest. I am not allowed to pass go, there is no $200 for me. This entry amounts to no more than public self-flagellation. And now I worry, isn't public self-flagellation a sin of pride?

Kick in the Can

It is often the small things that give me pause, make me think, that lead me down pathways that I did not really want to travel, but whose journey I am helpless to prevent. This morning as I walked our dog, I saw a bag of garbage in the middle of our street. Given the wildlife and the sometimes prodigious winds that we get, I did not find it too unusual. On the way back from our constitutional (which means the thirteen pounds of fluffy fury at the end of the leash was attempting to drag me with all due haste back to the house for his breakfast) I swerved into the street to pick up the trash (what a good neighbor I am). It was garbage day, and I was just going to put the bundle with my bins.

As I approached it, the bag looked odd. It was a heavy black yard bag torn and scraped with reuse and tied with a ragged piece of orange of nylon rope. When I picked it up, it was surprisingly light and rattled with the unmistakable sounds of aluminum cans. Odd. How did a bag of recycle get here in the middle of the street? If it had been an animal, it would have been ripped open in the primal quest for food. If it had been the wind, I would have seen small branches and other garbage around, which I didn’t.

I shrugged and set the bag down by my trash and went inside with Sailor to feed him, but my mind would not let go of the mystery. The morning activities of dishes, feed the dog, make breakfast distracted my thoughts, but left my relentless subconscious to plow ahead uninhibited by false perceptions and self-delusion often provided by my conscious mind. Suddenly as I moved on to gather my items (wallet, keys, etc.) for work, the light bulb moment struck, and my day got immediately sadder.

I stood still for a moment staring and unseeing, an image forming behind my eyes. I saw a man going through a garbage can or recycle bin placed curbside on the night before trash pickup. One can is found, two, three and separated from the other refuse to be placed carefully into a personal garbage bag. In the hours after midnight the street sleeps and there are no eyes to see as the man bends to tie rough orange line about the neck of bag to secure the treasure he has mined. He takes this bag, setting it with others in a bungeed nest on the back of his bike and shakily pedals off to find other bins, other foraged plunders. One of his bags shifts and drops from bike to street, lessening the burden, and lessening the pittance he hopes to reap from this evening’s covert labors.

The silent wraiths whose ranks have become bloated with the tumbled economy have crept from beneath their bridges, out of their cardboard boxes, from whatever tarp or tent that they bed in to hunt beyond the confines of downtown into the neighborhoods to seek out means of sustaining their lives. They are unorganized yet not unintelligent.

I have seen for myself and heard from others how the number of pan handlers has increased in downtown Colorado Springs. I know that they have become more aggressive as their swelling numbers stretch the resources and patience of the people they plead to for spare change and food. When food sources become scarce for bears and mountain lions they leave their habitat to enter the neighborhoods for fruit trees, garbage, and pets. It is not inconceivable that when the food chain is stretched thin for the disenfranchised that they would adopt a similar behavior.

The homeless have always made me uncomfortable, and I have kept them at arms length only giving money or bags of grocery when they are impossible to ignore, when the gnawing at my conscience strikes a calloused nerve of decency. I fear them because I believe I cannot help them, and because there for the grace of God go I. It is not easy to look into the mirror that reflects possibility of our lives; it is often not a pretty picture.

The homeless are ghosts in the truest sense. They wander unnoticed through the ranks of the living, when seen they are often gray, colorless phantoms at the edge of our perceptions that we hope to exorcise through the invocation of the Lord’s name and what loose change we have in our pockets. They are the other one percent. Not the one’s we envy, but the ones we forget about, the ones we deny. They are below the middle class, below the poor; they inhabit the grimy bottom rungs of the ladder of success.

They do not pay taxes, and many do not receive any kind of welfare. To borrow a phrase from the late Hunter S. Thompson, they are the “doomed”. We see them with leathery skin and empty eyes screaming at no one as they walk the streets. We see them with their hungry children on exit ramps holding homeless-made torn cardboard signs begging for food, for help. We see them lined up outside the Catholic soup kitchen in the rain with backpacks, bags, and strollers waiting for the doors to open and a meal to warm their hollow bellies. The old homeless clash with the new homeless in a country that already does not support the former much less address the latter.

As the presidential election looms ever closer, I do not hear either campaign decrying the plight of the homeless, or saying that a concerted effort be made to help them. They talk of job creation, restoring the middle class, and tax cuts, but do not say how these jobs or that class or tax rate cuts can touch those that have sunken below the radar. We the people are deaf to this problem, and they the politicians are both blind and mute to it. Maybe what we should do is concentrate on our independence from the rest of the world, stop trying to influence people who do not want our influence, end sending our fortunes abroad to help the helpless in other countries, and spend time keeping our own house in better order.

No Future

The homeless surround me. I see the lost souls wherever I go. As I sit this morning in Starbucks, they sit outside in the enclosed cafe table area looking gathered, looking fenced in. Their silent stares are loud enough to send me shuffling in any direction they are not. My ears are ringing and my thoughts race. They are a sad, lost, sometimes violent culture existing like ghosts at the edges of civilization; only these phantoms do not vanish when I look full on them after catching them from the corner of my eye. As I gaze, these phantoms shimmer and solidify into human beings - the last thing I want. I don't want to be hit with the sight of them; I don't want them to have focus and context. I would prefer that they remain ghosts instead of being forced to acknowledge that they are people with a past, a present, and perhaps no future.

Their ranks have swollen, and they seem everywhere. Not just at Starbucks, but in a small outcropping of trees on a vacant lot down the street, under bridges, in store parking lots, on highway ramps, under our noses, eyes piercing from dark weathered faces, holding signs pleading in block letters for money, for food, for help. They offer nothing in return, not even the promise to fade away. I help, I move on, they stay to be helped by another or ignored by another, but still they are standing, pleading, watching - a sad soulless cycle.

All I seem to do is let it gnaw at my conscious. All I can do is sit here and feel bad, wanting to save the world. I am worried beyond that, my desire to save the world may simply be there to salve my own ego and assuage my own guilt. I don't know if I can save those I love, much less myself, much less the world.

So I sit, write, drink coffee all on a full stomach. Soon I will stand, put some coins in the homeless meter by the door, and go to my car with head down and eyes averted, trying to avoid the homeless phantoms, trying to forget that I am surrounded by people with a past, a present, and no future.