One glance
Blue, Denise
THE LAST WORD
ONE GLANCE
Denise Blue
It was payday for the homeless: food stamps and welfare checks had arrived. For a few days, we would eat, drink, and be merry, freed from the onerous task of...
...What I had imagined would be a life of freedom, filled with carefree hoboes laughing over campfires, became a constricting existence: cold, hunger, violence, rejection, a continual moving on...
...Soon I became familiar to the police and was chased away from the parks, wakened in the night, taken to jail: normalcy reestablished itself...
...One morning, after collecting a welfare check, I boarded a bus for another park where a group of us planned to pool our income...
...By midafternoon, the police arrived...
...I was new to the town and had not yet accumulated the tickets for loitering, drinking, and public disturbance that the homeless collect daily...
...People who had been invisible to me now became my peers...
...For a few days, we would eat, drink, and be merry, freed from the onerous task of asking for spare change...
...Move along or you'll go to jail...
...However, that day it did not seem normal to be shooed away...
...I'm Doctor Blue," I said, extending my hand...
...Why not give it all up...
...there, for a moment, two very different worlds had intersected...
...The homeless world closed in on me and it became impossible to conceive of escape...
...But I soon discovered that I'd become invisible to those who lived in my former world...
...To stop anywhere was risky: the sight of us disturbed people...
...For companionship, I discovered that I was one of many...
...When I reached the park, the usual crowd was not there...
...Why pay rent...
...On the bus, I grabbed a pole and glanced at a woman across from me who was dressed for work...
...We knew that our prosperity was temporary, but for the moment, we would celebrate...
...For sleeping, I found abandoned cars, shrubbery, freeway off-ramps...
...I'd watch them pass by, dressed up, hurrying to work or to shop, and although we walked the same streets, they'd become alien creatures who were adept at not seeing me...
...Why struggle...
...As she returned my look, her expression changed to one of shock, pain, and grief...
...Where most see lost souls, they see people with stories to tell, jokes to make, songs to sing...
...So I did...
...There is something wrong here," said her look, and it registered within me...
...I observed street people to discover how they managed to do without home, job, family, possessions, and live day-to-day...
...Where most see trash, they see beautiful or useful objects...
...Where most people see wilderness, they see potential shelter...
...THE LAST WORD ONE GLANCE Denise Blue It was payday for the homeless: food stamps and welfare checks had arrived...
...My colleagues and I are researching the effects of homelessness...
...We've had complaints," said one...
...I'd be happy to reassure anyone who has complained that we intend no harm...
...Why impress...
...Through her eyes, I saw myself: dirty, tired, very thin, half my face bruised...
...It is a different world that makes sense only on its own terms...
...We took our food and drink to a public park and sat in the pergola, feeling grand, surveying the town below us...
...For eating, I found dumpsters and soup kitchens...
...In the process, I became one...
...Yet it was while living in the homeless world that I experienced what power there is in a moment of compassion...
...Denise Blue lives in South Pasadena, California.ena, California...
...I clutched her prayer as tightly as I did the pole, wondering if I could ride it as if it too were a bus...
...I had once been a professional person-a researcher, college teacher, and free-lance editor-but had left that world to become a street person, an abrupt career change that lasted ten years...
...Each day, street people begin with nothing and make something from it...
...The person I had been years before had arisen and asserted that, of course, we could use the park...
...I wondered...
...Instead, a deep calm surrounded me like a shield, and its protective presence allowed me to walk away...
...Then she closed her eyes for a moment and I knew she was praying for me...
...In the days and years that followed, I renewed contact with family, returned to teaching and writing, rebuilt a life...
...My demand in the park that we be treated as citizens worked just that once...
...The order was neither unexpected nor unusual...
...I realized she was showing how she felt about me, a homeless stranger, and that I had not been seen that way for a long time...
...Startled, the police consulted with each other and left...
...My certainty had convinced the police...
...I was startled too...
...In those years, my thought patterns, appearance, and behavior changed...
...Why succeed...
...One day it had occurred to me that I no longer wanted to strive...
Vol. 122 • December 1995 • No. 22
