Ten years ago, while I worked on my MFA but before I started my eight years of thesis hours (no joke,) I had a couple of classes, one fiction, one poetry, in which we volunteered at the local homeless shelter and taught some of the "residents" creative writing techniques.
We learned a lot about life that semester, about pedagogy, and about human nature. The couple of months I spent homeless, I got to hop from a bed in one friend's house, to a bed in another, while people I knew and trusted watched my son and other friends drove me around town helping me search for jobs, aid, and more permanent shelter. I had a whole posse of mamas watching my back, all peers, most of whom I barely knew before all this happened, and thanks to them, my son and I never had to sleep in a shelter, or beneath the open sky.
The people we taught that semester were not so fortunate. They had no real friends or generous acquaintances to help them. They had no family, or their families turned their backs on them.
That semester, listening to these amazing people tell their stories using the techniques of storytelling and poetry that we taught them, changed me forever. Perhaps someday I'll be able to better describe it.
The thing that stayed with me most after that class was my professor, Terry Thaxton's, lecture about how many homeless people are treated as if they are invisible. All they want is for someone to SEE them, to recognize them as human, as beings deserving of acknowledgement, respect, and compassion.
And then, last night, I was busy trying to write and organize at Starbucks, getting the Moody Mamas Support Network going on Facebook...totally ignoring the homeless man who came in and sat on the couch across from me.
When he was walking past me, his hand hit one of the chairs and my table and he said, "ow!" then, "Sorry!"
I threw a half-assed smile at him without taking my eyes off my computer screen as I typed, and muttered, "No problem..."
He stopped and stared at me for a long moment. At the time, I thought he was trying to see what I was typing, and I turned my back to him ever so subtly more.
After that long moment, he sat down, commenting loudly to himself about the food he had in a bowl smelling bad, he definitely needed to throw it out, good GOD that stank, definitely bad, stinks stinks stinks...
I was getting irritated because he was distracting me, so I picked up and went home to finish writing in the car.
It wasn't until after I went to bed that I realized what happened, and what I'd done.
That man so desperately wanted someone to see him, to look him in the eye, to recognize that he was there. I'm actually crying right now because I feel so bad that I was so absorbed in my own world that I couldn't even spare him a full-on smile.
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| This isn't him, but he looks similar. I think. *hangs head |
Next time I see him, I'll make sure to look him in the eyes and ask him how he's doing.
Even if it means giving up some of my writing time so he can talk.
I owe the world that much.
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