If you live just about anywhere in this country, you have seen them.
Men and women waiting for you at train stations, on city streets and busy highway intersections and offramps. Their clothes and faces wear the strain of nights spent in the cold. They're as frayed about the edges as the cardboard signs that spell out the circumstances of their lives.
The odd thing is, those signs are usually not easy to read from your car window, or from a distance on the street. But the point isn't to guide you to an exit or a coffee shop. It's a life story in magic marker, written by someone who wants you to understand.
They wait, with a hand out or a coffee can, hoping you'll take pity.
Maybe you've given a quarter or a dollar to one of these people once in a while.
Maybe you haven't.
Perhaps, you were once suckered by someone's sob story – you know the one, about the wallet that got locked in the car that got towed and he needs whatever you can afford for a bus or train home? And five minutes later, when you saw that same person buying cigarettes or making a cell phone call or trying the same heartfelt, desperate story on a tourist, you decided: No more. And so you folded the con artists and phonies in with the drug addicts and drunks – recovering or otherwise – who were appealing to you for your money.
After all, who are you to be judge and jury of their lives? How can you tell the frauds from the genuine hard-luck cases? Who's really sober and who's lying so convincingly that even he or she believes it?
Maybe you've said it, maybe you've heard it and maybe you believe it: They're just lazy. They would not be out here if they really wanted to get better and get a grip on life. They wouldn't be living under the expressway or an abandoned building or spending days on the street and nights in shelters and ATM vestibules. They'd go to AA, take their meds, summon the willpower to give up the bottle or the pipe, whatever it takes. But they don't. So they're here. Day after miserable day.
So you don't believe anyone. You keep your head down and your hands in your pockets and you don't make eye contact as you cross the street or drive by, windows up and doors locked.
You're hardly alone in this regard. And it's not like you were their only hope, right? There are people in this country willing to help them help themselves.
But there's a question to which you don't know the answer.
Who was it you passed on your way to the office this morning?
Was she a bank teller or an account executive? Did he teach, write or fix cars? Have their families given up all hope and forgotten them? Did their friends write them off? Do they have children?
Maybe he was Ted Williams, an ex-radio announcer who somehow wound up begging for change and a clean start in life at a highway ramp in Columbus, Ohio. Maybe he got sobedr after problems with alcohol and drugs, but after all those years of damaging his own life and damaging relationships, there really was nowhere to go, no one to believe in him and no other options.
Until someone wanted to hear his story.
I hope that story's true - and ends well this time.
