LETTERS FROM HOME: UP AND DOWN

Jan. 13, 1994

Dear Leslie,

Just as I am settling into my comfortable new home in California, the reality that so many people have none seems everywhere I look. DC's father is in Hong Kong this month giving dental care to Vietnamese people staying in refugee camps. Homeless people who were evicted from a beach not far from here have taken the state to court, claiming that roaring spot of sand as their own. Sixty miles north of Eureka, 180 homeless people bed down in the Rescue Mission nightly, and some of them complain about the preaching that comes with the meal. The city and county have applied for a $1 million federal grant to help build a new shelter, but nobody wants to put it in their backyard.

Here in Garberville, community groups like DC's church take turns housing and feeding homeless people from month to month. The town is so small that we know their faces if not their names, and each day at sundown witness their pilgrimage from wherever the day has taken them to wherever they will dream that night. You wonder how those who are addicted to alcohol and drugs manage, and realize they barely do.

A homeless man broke into DC's church in the middle of the day. Deputies found him passed out in the sanctuary, drenched in rain from the night before. He told them he did it because he was freezing. That Sunday the minister asked the congregation to pray for him.

A few days ago DC came home from work and told me to grab a flashlight. We walked the few blocks to the community hospital, which has 18 beds. I held the light while she peered into the blood-clotted mouth of a woman who had just survived an alcoholic seizure. Some of her bottom teeth were now lying sideways, knocked there by the force of her top teeth coming down.

Outside in the hall an elderly man in a beard and an old plaid coat slowly, lovingly pushed a deathly pale woman in a wheelchair. Up and down, up and down.

The story you wrote about your brother Sammy made me better understand how and why someone might choose to be homeless, a choice some of the people I see obviously have made. They discuss Steinbeck and the life of the town as if they were sitting in a booth in the Woodrose Cafe instead of at a communal table downing whatever is offered. This is their place, for now.

I don't know if the substance abusers or the able-bodied ones make people madder. What I think is this: All of them, con artists and victims of circumstances alike, give the rest of us an opportunity to learn compassion. If it matters to us whether they are deserving, then we are not suffering with them -- compassion defined -- but rather judging them.

If it were easy to live by the difference, Jesuses wouldn't be necessary.

Every week the minister at DC's church asks if there is anyone we should pray for. Last Sunday a woman in the back, Bel, spoke up, said she'd met an elderly man from a nearby town whose wife was in the local hospital. She said she'd noticed him walking up and down the street in front of her house and guessed from his clothes that he might be homeless. I guessed they were old and plaid. When she decided to ask him in for a cup of coffee, he told her he was just passing the time while his wife slept. The old man said he didn't expect his wife would be going home with him.

Pray for us all.

Love, Sam