Homeless Hero

When my father retired from his job as a well-respected environmental scientist, I thought he might take up golf, travel the world or just watch a lot of TV. Instead, he started volunteering five days a week at a homeless shelter. I was shocked, to say the least. Who retires from 30-year career to work at a homeless shelter for free? Who fantasizes about that day when they won’t have to work anymore so they can work some more at no pay and with the homeless?
Further, he admitted to me that he didn’t feel his volunteering there made much of a difference. This was a solution-driven, results-based man. He wouldn’t have lasted a day as a research scientist otherwise. What had happened to my father? Was he truly (as I had always suspected) crazy?
My lack of understanding only grew. During my first visit to the shelter where he worked, I had the opportunity to talk with some of the homeless persons there. I was 39 years old, and it occurred to me that I had never spoken with a homeless person before. I did not even know what the term meant.
I was also shocked to learn that many of the homeless people I spoke with seemed no different from you or me. And that scared me a bit. I’d always assumed there was a difference between them and us. T at difference kept me from being “one of them,” from being homeless. If there wasn’t a difference, or if I didn’t know what that difference was, then I could just be one chance occurrence or one unforeseen mistake away from being homeless. I had just left a stable job of 13 years for reasons I didn’t fully understand. The decision, I worried, could easily be that unforeseen mistake.
But the emotions ran deeper still. I sensed some kindred feeling when I spoke to the men at the shelter. They were a reminder of a feeling of emptiness—of being out of place—that I only then realized had followed me for much of my life. At times, when things were good, I hardly noticed it. But even during good times, the emptiness had always been there.
It was that night, couched safely in my parent’s home—the home I had grown up in, that I pondered my first real interaction with homeless persons. How did they get there? Why did my father work there? What was keeping them there? I didn’t have good answers to any of these questions, which led to an even greater concern: I really didn’t know what homelessness was. I was 39 years old, yet I couldn’t hold a discussion with someone about homelessness beyond the fact that these persons had no homes.
As a person who prides himself on being knowledgeable about the conditions of the world and, more importantly, the causes of those conditions, it bothered me that I didn’t know or understand anything about what I was witnessing. I had literally never thought about “it.” I had just chalked “it” up to bad luck, mental illness, drug addiction or just plain laziness. But the brief time I spent with the men at my father’s shelter had already poked holes in such sophomoric theories.
Bad luck couldn’t explain why someone stayed homeless. True, some of the men seemed a bit “off ,” but so have a lot of the people I have met and even worked with. Drug addiction seemed like a factor for some but may have been more of a symptom than a cause. (And again, many of the people I used to work with in corporate America had drug addictions.) As for laziness, many of the men worked very hard, harder than I was accustomed to. It just didn’t seem to get them anywhere, and of course, I didn’t know why.
My simple visit with my father had left me with a myriad of complicated questions. What made them homeless and me not? Did they deserve their lot? Why did the entire issue scare me to think about or to get close to? I think many of us at some time in our lives have asked at least a few of these questions. But most of us, myself included, have never really answered them except by assigning some unexplored blanket answer. They’re crazy. Lazy. On drugs. Unfortunate.
I knew that in order to properly answer any of those questions, I would have to understand the subject they all stemmed from. I would have to understand what the term “homelessness” really means. At the time, I just knew that I did not know.
So it was over a family dinner of steamed artichokes—a dish my mother had made for us hundreds of times—that the idea came to me. I would interview homeless people, and also those like my father who worked with them, in order to discover answers to the questions of homelessness. What the term homeless really means. That simple man, that innocuous visit, that familiar dinner and that small idea are what started this book.