I pass a homeless person almost every morning on my way to the subway. I'm almost endlessly fascinated by homeless people, so let me share this.
I assume she is a woman, but it's hard to tell because she wears the same layers of street-grey sweatshirts with a knit hat pulled fairly low. She pushes a shopping cart that seems always to have about four or five garbage bags stuffed full of empty cans and bottles. The garbage bags are always full, which makes me wonder if she ever cashes them in.
The interesting thing about this woman is that, just like me walking to the subway, she has a routine. In fact, she seems to stick to her routine better than I do, such that I can judge my punctuality by where on the street I see this woman. She comes from somewhere to the north of Borough Hall, stops at the bagel cart on Boerum just south of Joralemon, buys a doughnut (which I'm sorta confident is always a bavarian cream), then walks it and her bulging cart down to between State and Atlantic. She stops here, leaving her cart on the street side of the curb, because there is a large concrete stairway that juts out from the front of this building, the kind that comes out and has a landing which then itself splits down to either side and takes up half the sidewalk space. She chooses the stairs that split to the south and sits down in the shelter there on the lower steps and deliberately unwraps and eats her doughnut. When finished she goes on to Atlantic and turns east, thereby ending our fleeting cohabitation.
The time it takes her each day to pass through the same portion of the world as I do is maybe 20 minutes. The time it takes me to do the same is maybe 5 minutes, but then as I said I'm not as punctual as she is, and my appearance along that stretch of Boerum could be anywhere from 7:55am through 8:20am. There is no way that this woman is not timing her moves.
Does she have a watch? Where did she get it? How does she replace the battery? There is an obvious answer here--that she could very easily just look up at the clocktower near Atlantic Terminal and find the time--but that doesn't answer the deeper curiosity: why check the time at all?
Why does she hold to this schedule? The doughnut-seller will be at that corner for several hours, so it's not like she has to restrict herself on account of him. In the summer months, there is daylight for a very long time before 7:45am, so it can't be that she simply wakes up with the sun and gets her breakfast.
She has to be consciously regimenting her day, perhaps just for it's own sake (sanity?). I'm going to make a gross assumption here, but I don't think she has much of a reason to follow a rigid schedule on any given day. Maybe a soup kitchen serves lunch during a certain window in the middle of the day, and maybe she knows a restaurateur who gives her food at a general hour, but these aren't the kinds of appointments that must be strictly attended at exact times, nothing such that she would do the same things every morning within less than five minutes difference from day to day.
I think that this woman, when she wakes up every morning, knows from habit and experience how much time she has in that day. She must have a few things that she knows she will do, such as buy that bavarian cream doughnut, but outside of those, what happens? Presumably she collects cans, but there is hardly a schedule for that.
What I'm perhaps awkwardly trying to get at is that this woman makes a conscious effort to keep herself on a schedule. Her brain is still organizing. She hasn't totally checked out from this world. And yet there she is, utterly homeless, not the kind who exhorts people on the subway. I've never seen her with another person. Aside from the doughnut guy, I don't think I've ever seen her acknowledge the existence of another human being. This is a person who has been homeless for a long time. And yet she seems to have the same kind of approach to a day as any one of us more-fortunate people. She has her own unknown purpose, but still she has it.
I'm not really sure what the point is for me writing all this. The more I think about it, the more questions seem to pop up. Why, mostly. I guess that's what it means to be fascinated by something.
2 comments:
many homeless people make a conscious decision to be homeless. i recently read something in the times about how every "permanent" homeless person living in times square had been persuaded to leave and go to a shelter, with the exception of one guy going by the handle of 'Heavy'. the important thing there is that those people needed to be persuaded. for many, it took multiple tries to convince them.
one possibility for your friends punctuality could be that she gets kicked out of her shelter at a certain time each morning. many shelters only allow people to sleep overnight and then they're back on the street.
another possibility could be that her routine is the only thing she has to maintain her sanity..
That decision to be homeless, or more specifically, the decision to accept it as fate, is what interests me the most about homeless people. Surely many of them have physical or mental issues that they could never hope to control alone, but there has to be a large percentage that once were members of society and somehow lost their way. It's like, how does a seemingly normal person become a murderer? And why does he choose to stay that way, assuming he has the ability to choose?
Getting kicked out of a shelter in the morning is a very logical explanation for my homeless person's consistent presence. And the maintaining sanity thing is exactly what I was assuming.
I have an update about "her," by the way. She is male. I saw him a couple days ago and with the much warmer weather he sheds the layers and the heavy concealing hat. Everything else was the same, though.
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