When she walked into the room, her decision only solidified. The gun already lay there. But next to it Shannell found her final justification for suicide—her sister’s body.

With blood puddled on the floor from her sister’s self-inflicted wound, Shannell was going to follow her sister’s example. The gun was the quick answer; she was going to use it on herself.

But she couldn’t get anywhere close to her sister or within arm’s reach of the gun. Desperate to pull the trigger, it wasn’t fear or grief that stopped her. She didn’t even attribute the invisible force that kept her alive to anything within herself.

Shannell told me this like an icebreaker, but her arms were held close to her body as if to defend herself from her words, and her already small frame seemed to shrink beneath what she said.

I blinked, trying to comprehend where this brunt of unprovoked, heart-wrenching honesty was coming from and why it was popping up now instead of the two times I had interviewed her.

If there’s a way to shrug with your eyes, Shannell pulled it off, acting as if the story she’d just told me wasn’t the important part but what she had done afterward was:

“I told God if He wouldn’t let me kill myself, He had to give me a purpose for my life.”

I opened my mouth to speak and something unintelligible fell out.

That moment 18 years ago defined her life. I heard it all to the side of an auditorium of people, tucked away in a dark corner; it was so matter-of-fact and understated that it was nothing but earnest.

Beside us, 150 middle-schoolers around tables sat watching a slideshow on a 10-foot screen of what they’d done that month at their summer camp. Soccer, high dives, blinking neon science projects—and there was Shannell, in front of a classroom of students. It was her job to provoke each inner-city youth to dig for some kind of direction for his or her life.

The first time I talked to Shannell after one of her sessions, she got a little flustered trying to come up with an honest answer to my generic questions about working with at-risk youth. I wondered if she was something other than the canned, calloused inspirational speaker we all envision with a two-foot-wide smile and megaphone voice.

Shannell had no qualms projecting authority on stage, steering a classroom of middle-schoolers toward some kind of purpose. But off-stage, that demeanor deflates into something softer. I was getting a glimpse of the other side of the energy she projects.

When she talked to me, her eyes didn’t droop, she didn’t frown, but there was weight. She was physically carrying what she said in her taut mouth and thin shoulders slightly hunched.

At the luncheon celebrating and encouraging 150 kids she had tried so hard to spur into a purpose, she dropped the curtain on her jolting moment to me. It’s either sick coincidence or an unconventional sense of humor that the purpose she found is to inspire purpose.

His glassy, teal eyes rolled slowly to the back of his skull, as they had done so many times during our conversation, before flittering back into focus.

“Nah,” I said. I had long given up trying to maintain eye contact. “But I can listen. If that helps any.”

Justin was constant motion, constant movement. His eyes drifted like stray marbles behind eyelids that bobbed up and down, open and closed. His head swayed, he trembled occasionally, and at one point his leg shook so violently I was certain it would detach. The clear plastic Starbucks cup of water and the cigarette—long and gray with granny-ash—were virtually forgotten as he’d occasionally bury his shaven head in his full hands.

He was pretty strung out. But that was the least of his problems.

Things were not going smoothly when Justin proposed to his fiancé. She was pregnant with his child, a girl. She constantly threatened to leave him and abort the baby, and would routinely throw her engagement ring to the street for Justin to retrieve. (After all, he was still making payments.)

But Justin was no saint himself. He would shoot heroin with his fiancé’s father, an addict for more than 10 years, and provide him with the drug. So when her father was found dead in his bedroom, needles plunged into his arms, Justin’s fiancé blamed him for supplying the heroin, and subsequently, her father’s death. Still, the couple stayed together, for the sake of their baby—blond-haired, blue-eyed Amanda.

But their relationship was ill fated. Justin’s fiancé refused to allow Justin’s parents to see Amanda, creating serious dissension among the family. Additionally, she was suffering severe postpartum depression and physically taking it out on Justin.

He was tired of it.

One snowy day, he went to his fiancé’s house, shoved her and grabbed the ring off her hand—he figured she’d throw it in the snow anyway. The police were called. A restraining order was filed against Justin. His fiancé was admitted to a mental institution, and baby Amanda, now 18 months old, was sent to live with relatives.

“I think Amanda thinks about me,” Justin said, smiling a bit. “I think she does. I remember the last time I saw her. She was trying to be all shy. She’d look at me and smile, and turn away, and then look again, and then smile and turn away really quick.” Tears began to stream down his cheek, he bowed his head and rubbed his eyes. “I just want to see my daughter.”

I didn’t know what to say. What could I say?

“She’s a part of me, you know?” he continued. “She’s so beautiful. But I don’t even have a picture of her. I had one picture and I would keep it in my wallet, and then my wallet got stolen. I don’t even have a picture of my own daughter.”

“So what are you gonna do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just so depressed. I’m so depressed.”

“Well, it’s going to take time,” I said. Cliché, but like Justin said, I’m not a therapist. “It sucks. It really does. But the only way you’ll get through this is taking your time. Your fiancé needs time to straighten things out, you need time to straighten out. You just gotta give it time.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I’m impatient.” I smiled, and so did he.

“Sorry, I know it’s weird to just listen to some stranger’s drama,” Justin said. “But, I don’t know, it’s different talking to a girl than a guy. You know, ‘cause of the emotions and stuff.”

I nodded, though feeling a pinch guilty at my stoic demeanor. I gave Justin my lighter and I told him I’d pray for him, and his fiancé, and Amanda. He thanked me.

My brother and I were wandering through a two-block cluster of tents and trailers. The dusty, gritty lot had laundry hanging in every direction, pup-tents made from propped-up tarps, reeking portable toilets as the only structures, planes constantly roaring overhead, and makeshift homes filled with hundreds of men, women, and children.

The chronically homeless, families who had just been evicted, teens down on their luck, and kids looking for a thrill had flocked to this 100-square yards sandwiched between the Ontario Airport and derelict houses.

Monroe was none of these. He was a parolee whose supervising officer had placed him at the newly christened dirt lot when there was nowhere else for him to live.

The media called it Tent City. The name was fitting before the city started regulating who deserved to stay and the number of tents dwindled to 20 or 30. Needless to say, someone like Monroe—just finishing paying for mistakes he made—was not welcome after that.

The reason Monroe was sentenced was muddled. The nearest I heard was some muttering about his arrest, which, of course, he still viewed as unfair. Whatever the case of the arrest—just or unjust—the situation he was in now was much more lucid.

Monroe sat in a raised director’s chair next to a fire burning in a washer drum. At 2 p.m., the fires scattered throughout the camp gave the whole scene a melancholy feel. It’s an entirely different mood to gather around a warm, licking fire late at night than it is to sit and talk over one in mid-afternoon where the flames seem cold and dead.

Monroe was mater-of-fact about his predicament. Blunt to the point of bitterness. 

When Monroe got out of jail, he had no place to go, and his parole officer had no place to put him. Monroe had a career to fall back on, but, being on parole, he wasn’t allowed to leave the state. There aren’t exactly a glut of in-state jobs when the assignment is long-haul trucking.

He reminisced about the late nights and long drives, and it was clear exactly where his element was. But he had been forced out of it by poor decisions in his past.

Someone interrupted us by asking to borrow cooking oil, and Monroe quickly burrowed into his stash of cans and bottles in cubbyholes beneath an A-framed tarp and passed out a jar with no questions asked.

When he turned back to me I asked the only thing I could think of that I might possible know about driving state-to-state by myself.

“Did it ever get lonely?”

“No.” (I told you he was matter-of-fact.)

Apparently there was always someone cracking jokes over the CB or “some crackhead getting chased by cops.”

That was the only real conversation I had with Monroe, but he was exemplary of what was going on at Tent City. My brother and I drive the hour and a half to Ontario because we wanted to see for ourselves the community that had developed around a dirt lot. By the time we were there to see it first-hand, Monroe and anyone who wasn’t originally from Ontario were in danger of being kicked out.

Police went through the area checking everyone for documentation of where every person was from, gave them wristbands corresponding to how long they would be allowed to stay, and got ready to bus people back to their hometowns.

I got to hear Monroe’s take on that when he’d make his rounds through the city looking for a job and stop at the library to check his e-mail.

I got two sentences from him:

“i got my slave wrist band today”

And two days later:

“they are kicking me out monday”

The rest of the story I had to hear from my brother. He showed up that Monday when the city evicted non-Ontario natives.

The scene by which he was greeted was Monroe being ziptied and placed on the dusty ground as soon as he walked onto the premesis to pack his belongings and wander off… somewhere. His parolee status had caught up with him. He wasn’t allowed to set foot on the property even though his parole officer had placed him as a resident there. There was some outcry, but outcry among the marginalized people who lived there, people who are easily dismissed.

Today my brother summed up exactly what happened to the individuals there and the temporary community they formed. “Monroe personified Tent City. Everyone there knew him.”

Shame nobody knows where he is now.

I hadn’t realized this, but whenever someone would talk to her she would lean forward, squint a little through the glasses in between her hair, graying at the bangs and cropped at her forehead so it frames her glasses and face almost in a rectangle.

I’d seen Beth almost weekly for the last few months, but I realized until now it was much too easy to not pay enough attention to her.

She’s a short, round woman who walks with a slight limp when you stop to pay attention, but the problem is getting someone to pay that much attention. I was guilty of not taking enough notice.

It’s too easy to take a glance at someone and assume—based on one quick look—that you don’t have enough in common to strike up a decent conversation.

I don’t know why, but the middle-aged woman with slightly stringy hair and a smile missing a tooth seemed foreign to me, someone I wouldn’t be able to relate to.

That was my pitfall. It was easy to notice that throaty, nervous laugh and slightly flustered demeanor and move on.

But last week she taught me something I didn’t know.

Beth is a teacher’s aid at the high school down the road from where I live. It’s the party school. Drugs and booze are pretty synonymous with South High.

But whether it’s her 18-year-old son or day-to-day interaction with students there, that intense attentiveness applies to kids struggling through high school.

I had no idea there was a teenager living on the roof of the Subway restaurant next door to my apartment building. I had no idea some of the high schoolers loitering on the stairs in front of the buildings on my block had no home, no where else to go.

Beth knew though. She knew most of them by name.

She knew that every day one of them heads to work at a grocery store a few blocks away, buys non-perishable food and stashes it on the rooftop where he spends every night, 40 feet away from my bedroom.

I’ve had people coming to my door complaining about teenagers sitting in front of my apartment building. I doubt any of them realized some of them were trying to pick up a second job at McDonald’s or sleeping in the park across the street.

It amazes me how many people view a few kids on the stairs as hooligans. It amazed Beth too.

When one of them asked if he could rent a room from her for just two weeks her response was, ”Tanner, I’d take you in for free in a heartbeat, but I’m already in trouble with my manager.”

It turns out she had already been housing a new adult. An 18-year-old right out of high school had been kicked out of his home because of issues with his dad’s girlfriend. But after the management found out he was staying there without being on the lease, he had to go.

So, even if I saw them as more than hooligans, I definitely didn’t see just how much attention and care Beth gave to those students.

It sounds blunt to say she’s easy to overlook, but Beth’s impact on those teenagers is definitely apparent.

By the end of listening to her that night, the smile missing a tooth had gone from foreign to friendly. I’m sure that’s exactly the effect it has on the kids she interacts with, nurtures, and protects every day.

Tangled blonde hair spilled from her fur-trimmed hood and hung low to her waist. Her hands were jammed in the pockets of her parka, worn and blue like her eyes. From chapped pink lips, she unconfidently muttered the words “Spare change?” to the deaf ears of those passing by.

I happily strolled along Fifth Avenue on my way home from work, iPhone in one hand and a carton of leftover Chinese lunch in the other. The somber gray sky from the early morning had dissolved to blue wash, and I could finally wear my heavy coat unzipped while outdoors. Spring was finally making its presence known.

Standing solitary between parking meters, she caught my eye from a few feet away as I chatted inanely on my phone. Panhandlers are a sad plenty on the streets in New York, but she stood out from the others.

She was young—possibly younger than I.

And it was apparent that begging for alms was not her typical Friday afternoon activity. Her words, barely audible, seemed to evaporate the second they left the tongue. Shy, meek, unobtrusive, unrehearsed, and desperately necessary.

And ineffective.

My high heels rhythmically clicked the sidewalk as I approached, but slowed in tempo as our eyes locked. She stared at me as I walked closer, but didn’t say a word—she didn’t ask me for money, just watched me as I passed. And I watched her back, haunted by her troubled gaze.

“I’ll call you back,” I said into my phone, and turned back toward the girl.

“Hey, you OK?” I asked.

“No, I’m not OK,” she snapped, frustrated. “I’m begging for money on the streets; I’m not OK.”

“Well, do you want some food?” I said, proudly handing her the cold, soggy remnants of my beef and broccoli. It had been drilled into my head that beggars are either drug addicts or wealthy businessmen in convincing hobo getup, and if you must be charitable it’s safest to buy the person a meal. I was lucky. I didn’t have to shell out a dime for my good deed.

She hesitated as she stared at the grease-stained paper bag. “Uh, yeah,” she muttered, reluctantly accepting the food. “Sure. Thanks.”

Her disappointment was as clear, and I realized the insincerity of my gesture. I wanted to help her as much as she wanted to be grateful for the food—but there was a hollowness in the exchange that was too apparent to ignore.

“Do you want some money?” I asked, more genuinely this time.

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I just need enough to get a hotel room. I can be out of everyone’s way if I can just get a room, and a shower.”

“OK, which hotel?”

She took a deep breath. “Some people offered to let me stay with them for $25 a night, and I can shower and sleep and whatever.”

“So is $20 enough?” I asked, pulling a $20 bill out of my wallet, fresh from the ATM. Her eyes widened and welled.

“Seriously?” She clasped her hand to her mouth as her tears rolled down her cheeks. “That would be…oh my god…”

“Here,” I handed her the bill, which she graciously took.

“Thank you so, so much,” she said. She wiped her eyes. “I don’t want to be here,” she said, peering at the throngs of people sashaying past. “I don’t want to be on the streets. I don’t want to be begging.”

I paused. “What happened?”

“My mom died and my dad’s in prison,” she said in a painfully factual tone. “I tried to stay with some family members, some relatives. They didn’t want me.”

They didn’t want me—the words resonated in my head.

“So here I am,” she said. “Now I’m on the streets.”

“Wow.” That was all I could say—so eloquently sensitive.

“I don’t get it,” she continued. “I don’t have to be here. If I stayed out here for one day and every person who passed gave me a dollar, I’d have a thousand dollars by the end of the day and I’d be off the streets. I’d be out of everyone’s way. I wouldn’t be just some beggar.”

“You’re right.” She had a highly unrealistic yet very valid point.

“I mean, I get it. Nobody wants to give money. They think I’ll spend it on drugs or booze. But really I’ll just take what I can get. A meal, anything.”

My heart sank. Her initially harsh attitude now seemed entirely justified. I was one of those people—I wanted to help, but I didn’t want to be inconvenienced and I didn’t want to be screwed over. But it was she who had been screwed over—by her father, by her relatives, by those who took advantage of others’ generosity before her.

And there really isn’t any way of knowing how the $20 was spent. But at that it point, it was of minimal concern to me. I wanted to make sure she knew that someone was listening to her needs, her story—not the needs of the “generic homeless” as instilled by our society, our friends, our churches.

I asked if there was anything else I could do to help, and she graciously said no, I’ve done more than enough, and she thanked me again for the money. I wished her luck and continued on home. And she continued to beg.

Cat was a broken lump underneath the 405 Freeway in L.A. when my brother pulled over the mini-van to pick her up.

In the middle of Lawndale, I’m not sure what possessed him and his two friends to stop at an underpass and walk up to someone. He gave a simple explanation. He thought she was hurt.

He turned out to be right, but not nearly how he expected.

Cat was more than talkative as soon as they showed up, but after they realized she wasn’t bleeding out on the side of the road, they weren’t sure what to do.

They ended up doing what they would have on a normal night. They grabbed dinner and a drink or two, only with an extra, wide-eyed, frizzy-haired companion this time.

Over a burger, they were taken aback by how fast she’d opened up to them, but as soon as they heard the beginning of the story, it made sense.

For years her only human contact was through the pre-paid cell phones she’d manage to sneak home and use until her boyfriend found them. She paid for them with abuse. She was his and nobody else’s, and she had bruises to show it.

I didn’t know any of this when I got a call at 11 p.m. asking me to bring 20 bucks to a tavern in Manhattan Beach. I didn’t hear it until I’d grumbled in the car all the way there about my how I shouldn’t have to bail out an irresponsible older brother.

So, standing in a damp alley behind a row of bars, I listened to the condensed version of what Cat had told them.

She’d run away, but the only place she had to run were the bushes behind a fence by the freeway where she still worried about being found. When she would force herself through the 4-inch gap in the gate, her frailty was painfully obvious.

The tattered windbreaker she wore and expanding tangle hair made her seem less scrawny and boney, but she still had a tiny 5-foot frame. Cat could have passed for a girl just stumbling into her tween years if it weren’t for her worn face and dead-pan matter-of-factness about her life. I never knew if her swollen cheeks and chin were a normal feature or something lingering from her boyfriend’s last fit.

I only got to see the truth about how bad of a shape Cat was in on the day I hopped the fence to help her carry a few scant items to the car so I could drop her off at a friend’s house. (I use the word “friend” loosely. She didn’t exactly seem welcome there either.)

Jumping over chain link from the top of electrical boxes and trapesing through ankle-deep ice plant isn’t something I do, but after I waited five minutes for her while I paced back and forth on the sidewalk, I figured she needed a hand.

That was the same night I picked her up from a McDonald’s. I won’t lie: I was a tad uncomfortable being the only one picking up the rough-around-the-edges woman I’d met only once before with three other people.

Regardless, I ended up sitting in a plastic booth hearing how she’d ridden the bus that day with nowhere to go, but it was a cheap place to be with nobody hassling her. Well, nobody hassling her after she explained to the other homeless man she was riding with that he wasn’t allowed to touch.

I dropped her off in front of a garage with a closed, peeling door and a gravel driveway after driving back and forth by a dark house three times. She wanted to scope it out, make sure nobody was waiting or watching for her.

From then, it was back to my normal life with a midterm the next day.

I never found out quite how she got into the mess she was in at that time. All I heard were tidbits about how much she’d been mistreated, how many times she’d ran away, how many times she’d been found and how, this time, she was going to stay away.

I hope that ended up being true.

I used to get calls from Cat every couple of days. But they stopped.

I don’t know what happened. After giving her a ride, paying her share of an electric bill—which happened to be exactly the amount of cash in my wallet—and calling a shelter for battered women, the calls abruptly stopped after I couldn’t show up to give her a hand one day.

I never followed up on that shelter. Now that I haven’t heard from her in almost a year, I wonder if it could have made a difference.

There must have been at least 10 on each arm—cuts, two- to three-inch horizontal slices from elbow to wrist. Some were stitched together with black wire, like little spider legs stretching through his skin. Others were shallow crevices filled with thin, red, bloody film. All were fresh. He handed me my share of the candy, and I thanked him, trying desperately not to stare at his butchered forearms.

We began to talk. First about Spanish, then in Spanish. He asked me if I go to school. He asked about my family. He asked where I’m from, how I like Brooklyn, how I like the weather, what I do for a living.

“Y tu?” I asked, fishing for the correct word in Spanish. “Tienes familia? Family?”

In broken English, Norberto began to explain that he said he served time in prison for a reason I didn’t exactly catch. Shortly after he was released, his wife and son died in a car accident. They were hit by a drunken driver.

“In the ground,” he said.

“Dead?” I asked. “Uh, muerto?”

“Si.” He pulled his thick wallet from his pocket. He flipped through several business cards and scraps of paper, stopping at a small photo of a young boy. “See?”

Salty tears slowly swelled in the corners of my eyes. “How old?”

“Nueve.”

Nine years old.

I patted the tears with the wool cuff of my sweater. “I am so sorry.”

He put the photo back in his wallet and tucked it in his back pocket. “I went crazy,” he said. He held out his left wrist and pantomimed slashes with his right hand. “I went crazy. Never again though. No more.”

“No, no more,” I said. “No mas!”

Norberto smiled. “Mas chocolate?” I nodded. After another quick trip to the vending machines (Norberto has quite the sweet tooth, apparently), we shared a pack of M&Ms. He tapped a few into my palm, and I ate them in chromatic order, my typical fashion. We chatted more about sports and dogs and weather and candy, and then my name was called over the speaker.

“That’s me,” I said, gathering my things. I paused. “Thanks for the candy.”

Norberto smiled. “De nada,” he said. “God bless.”

“You too.”

That, I assume, would be the last time I will ever see Norberto again. In all honesty, I don’t know if I’d even recognize him if I passed him on the street.

I figured Norberto had a reason for talking to me, but the pain I happened upon by just sharing a Twix wasn’t anything I could have fathomed.

He wasn’t offering me a candy bar as an insincere come-on, an empty compliment. I saw Norberto as a caricature, a New York stereotype before I saw his scars—all of them.

I don’t know what kind of effect that short conversation had on Norberto. For all I know, it was completely forgettable.

I met a man who had recently slashed his wrists in despair but was still trying to comfort me with a packet of M&Ms in the emergency room.

Norberto took the empty seat beside me. He had caramel skin and silver hair, slicked back, tucked behind his ears, grazing his shoulders. His black leather jacket was worn and gray at the elbows, closures broken, and his knee showed through a frayed hole in his jeans. Interjecting an occasional “Oh!” and “Ay!”, Norberto watched a basketball game on the flat-screen TV mounted high on the wall. “Sheeeeew!” he’d say, shaking his head and looking my way after an exceptionally good play. I’d smile, reaching into my pocket and slowly turning up my iPod.

At the commercial break, Norberto stood and rolled his shoulders out of his jacket. He laid it on his seat and pointed. “Please watch?” he asked.

I looked up from pamphlet I was reading. “Oh, sure,” I said.

He nodded and made his way to the reception desk, and my eyes followed. He spoke with the young, apparently puzzled receptionist with bleached hair and hand-drawn eyebrows. Defeated, she called someone else over, who calmly conversed with Norberto. He nodded and came back toward me.

“Thank you,” he said as he took his seat, placing his jacket on his lap.

“Ah,” I said. No reason to thank me for doing absolutely nothing.

“You speak Spanish?” he asked me.

I smiled. “Un poquito,” I said, pinching air between my fingers.

“Ah!” Norberto said, his eyes sparkling. “Eres muy bonita. Very beautiful.”

Beautiful. That was probably the least applicable word to describe me that day. I hadn’t showered, tied my frizzy red hair in a messy ponytail, and wore my brother’s frumpy old sweater—the one I found in a musty box in the garage.

As I’ve matured, I’ve grown accustomed to the frequent cat-calls on the street and insincere flirtations, and I’ve learned to ignore them completely. Perhaps the paper red hearts and cupid cutouts adorning the waiting room walls prompted me to, for once, take this compliment. After all, though I had never met Norberto, we immediately had one thing in common—we were stuck in the emergency room on Valentine’s Day.

“Oh,” I giggled, bashfully. “Heh, gracias.”

“Ah, muy bien!” he smiled. “What is your name?”

“Lindsey,” I said. “Y tu?”

“Norberto,” he said.

“Mucho gusto.”

“Igualmente.”

I smiled and nodded, and slowly reached back into my pocket for the comfort of my iPod. That was good. Painless. A nice, innocent conversation, and I didn’t have to give a fake number and he didn’t get the wrong idea.

Norberto reached into his pockets and retrieved a handful of crumbled dollar bills. “Soda?” he asked, pointing to the vending machines. Damn it! I thought I was off the hook.

“Oh, no thank you,” I said. I draw the line at soda.

“Candy? Chips?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” I repeated, this time a bit more assertively. He nodded and slowly sauntered to the vending machines. I quickly turned up my iPod and fished in purse for a book. Conversation was over. I was done being social for the day.

Norberto returned with a pack of Doritos in one hand and a Twix bar in the other. “Chips?” he asked.

I looked up from my book, shaking my head. “No, thank you. I’m not hungry. No tengo hambre.”

“Chocolate?” he asked.

“No chocolate.”

“I have one, you have one,” he said. “We share.”

Oh, the alluring beauty of the Twix: two bars in one package. Double your money and perfect for sharing. After now four hours in the waiting room, a chocolate-covered, caramelly, cookie-crisp made my mouth water. And, of course, it was Valentine’s Day. Even singles deserve chocolate on Valentine’s Day.

“Oh, all right,” I said. I closed my book and removed my earbuds. I realized the only harm in sharing a Twix with Norberto was the excessive calorie intake.

In anticipation of my confectionary indulgence, I watched Norberto’s hands clumsily tug at the golden plastic wrapper.

And then I noticed his wrists.

(Continued in part two.)

He called himself “the harmless, little wino,” and, as far as I could tell, he definitely was. He was usually drinking the wine out of a cup he’d gotten at McDonald’s too. It added to the persona.

I don’t have many neighbors from 12 years ago I remember. I guess it’s pretty normal for apartment life where people come and go – especially with my mom as the manager. I would see a random parade of tenants coming to the front door slipping in their rent or asking for a key after they locked themselves out for the fifth time that month.

I remember Rusty though.

I never really talked with him. I was still a kid, but I’d hear stories about how my grandpa offered to hire him but he was politely turned down in favor of bumming around. I’d just hear him strike up conversations with whatever parent I was walking down the stairs with.

Ironically – even though he was homeless – he’s one of the few people I feel comfortable calling a neighbor.

He was a fixture for years at McDonalds, the park across the street or on the planter in front of the building smoking a cigarette.

He disappeared at least five years ago, but I didn’t hear until recently what happened to him.

Jennifer – one of the neighbors I actually remember – got along pretty well with Rusty. She used to run out and buy him a pack of socks if he needed it.

It turns out that, one day, a woman came looking for Rusty. She’d driven across the country just for him.
She asked around and eventually ran into Jennifer who told her that if she stuck around for a few hours, she wouldn’t be able to miss him.

By that afternoon, Rusty had reconciled with this person who turned out to be his estranged wife and was on his way home to after what had to be 30 years of bumming around the South Bay.

I’m not sure if there’s a point to all this, but something about it seems vaguely significant. Maybe he’s just a memorable personality from my past. Maybe it’s the draw of the fairy-tale-like ending.

But I think I honestly just cared about what happened to him, or that’s just a sympathetic disguise for curiosity.
I hope it’s genuine concern.

It gets suggested to so often that people are the important part of life. I’m not sure how stalwart I am in that perspective when I’m pursuing a career, grades or money, but it’s a nice ideal.

I really do believe that people are much more important than anything material, but there’s a catch. Too often, my attitude becomes that I am the important person. It negates the soul of the ideal that it’s other people — not us — who should be what is important in life.

Rusty wasn’t just a little, old wino; he was a person with a story that I should believe is just as important as mine.

Out of all of this, I wish I knew the conclusion. I hope it turned out better then Rusty could have expected. I hope that rekindled marriage stayed strong. I hope he ended up with an ecstatic family and a job he’s happy doing.

Of course, maybe that’s not what he wanted.