The Second Homeless Person I Ever Met

The second homeless person I ever met was in Chicago in the summer of 1980.
The numbers seem small and my recollection good because I grew up in a small Wyoming town of no more than 2,000 people. If you were homeless in Greybull, you would have stuck out like paisley on stripes. Everybody had a place to stay, except for the occasional hobo, who would drift into town from the railroad tracks that defined the west edge of town, and maybe knock on a few doors for something to eat or some spending money.
Meeting someone with nothing to their name was a rarity for my time and place.
So here I was on Evans Avenue in Chicago at age 23. I was visiting a friend who worked during the day, so I did a lot of exploring along Evans, which was just a couple of blocks from my buddy’s apartment.
As a small-town kid, I enjoyed the thrum of the vast numbers of people all around me, and the persistence of normalcy I noticed along Evans. I remember the “Major Café,” with the “r” missing on the sign. I called it the “Majo” in my journal. There were small shops and people everywhere.
At one point, as I was walking along on my fourth or fifth day there, a shirtless thin black man with some gray in his beard walked toward me from the opposite direction. It would have been natural for us to pass.
He stepped gradually into my “lane” and we stopped, facing one another on the sidewalk; me feeling nothing other than curious.
“Hello sir,” he said to me. “You wouldn’t have any cash you could spare, would you? I am in a bad way.”
As a reflex I stuck my thumb in my hip pocket where my wallet was, but then realized I had no cash.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I only have traveler’s checks right now.” This was the truth.
“Alright,” the man said. “At least you talked to me.”
He gave me a quick embrace and said, “Thank you, anyway.”
I have never forgotten how deeply those words descended into my heart: “At least you talked to me.”
Hungry for food, but starving for kindness.