At the Shelter Last Night

They sat all around me at the table last night, these beautiful people who I’ve come to know over the past two months only because they’re homeless.  No, I need to correct that; only because they are in the situation of homelessness. 

One is finding herself, finding her worth, as she loses weight after mustering the courage to leave a physically abusive husband.  She
smiles a Mona Lisa mysterious smile, but tells us its secret source.  She remembers that she is good. 

Another quietly writes up cards for the game the group has worked on for the past two months, a game that has ups and downs based on the ups and down in their lives, like his returning from Iraq for the third time and not even being met at the airport by his family.  He has discovered the good feeling of helping others that are in the same mess as he. 

Another speaks candidly of having no one in her life that nurtured her, consoled her, gave her a sense of her innate value.  She smiles, too, her gray eyes brightening and matching her gray hair as she tells us that she wouldn’t change a thing, that her struggles are the rich source of her writing, which she sees as her legacy.    

Another speaks of gratitude and peace that he has found in this place, this shelter in fact and not just in name, where he has been able to heal through long slow recovery from an accident at home, an accident that happened after he had lost his job through a plant closing, and his self-respect with the uselessness that followed.

Another, new to me and to the group, has settled in a chair at the table, drawn by something, by the vibe perhaps, the soft voices, the deep eye contact, the warmth of good friends, of shared trust, of shared dreams. 

I feel blessed to be among them, blessed because despite my not being in the condition of homelessness, they have taken me into their trust and friendship.  They have helped me see that we’re the same, really.  I’d made the mistake of thinking of myself as an outsider because I’m not homeless, different from them.  They’ve taught me that we’re in different situations, but we are at home around the same table.  In the next weeks and months they will move on.  Just last week one of our company at that table was able to move into an apartment and resume her life with her daughter, who had been placed in foster care while she recovered in the shelter from the onset of a chronic disease.  One of them will leave when his veterans’ benefits finally start.  I don’t know about the others, how they will find jobs and places to live.  I pray that around that table they find a love that will sustain them.  And I pray that those of us who have roofs over us do not have dry hearts as well as dry heads, that we are not isolated from good people like these, that we do not find our homes so well insulated that we suffocate for the lack of air, the same air that these good people breathe.

And now as I type it is raining on my roof.  I think of those I knew in Detroit, the rain-driven mist splashing into the overpasses under which they live, into the doorways and broken windows of the broken buildings in which they live out their broken lives.  I’ve not yet met the ones who live in tents here, who are so wounded or traumatized or unbalanced that they will not accept the repeated invitations to come to the shelter, to come and sit among these good people, in whose company I feel the same humanity for which they long, for which they too often have lost hope.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.