Why am I talking to the homeless?

To the Editor:

I have to stop talking — trying to talk — to homeless people. I just had my second fight with one in two weeks.

We were OK in the beginning, starting out. She — let's call her Sally — had her dog and I had mine, and the dogs got to talking, so, you know. Plus, she was knowledgeable; she knew the history of dogs. My mostly cocker spaniel is a hunting dog, she said, a water dog.

I think that's right. It was upsetting after the fight so I may be mixing up what she said about my dog with what she said about her dog's job originally. But like I said, we were just fine in the beginning when I was in my “there but for the grace of god, go I” mode.

I don't know why I think talking to the homeless is going to kick over some stone for me and I'm going to find gold underneath, or wisdom, some shiny fleck of something unexpected. But I do. The truth is, I do.

No, that's not true. Sometimes, I want to show I don't think I'm better than the homeless, that “there but for the grace of god, go I” mantra again playing in my mind like a Johnny Cash song. So, there I go again.

The homeless live in a swirl of conspiracy theories, fantastical thoughts; despite having lots of time on their hands, they lead pretty un-examined lives, if you ask me. That's a skill that comes with comfort, lamps to reach over and turn on, books to read three pages of before sleep; it doesn't come with watching out for your survival 24-7.

No one asked, but to me mental illness is common, and causal, among the homeless, looping on itself in renewal after renewal of explanations for their lives, their predicaments, their memories to themselves. They are shell shocked both from a daily and a distant war. And they tell you about it while they tell it to themselves. They lead the way on dark mine tours through their thoughts, but the lantern is dim and their way is quickly lost.

That's when the fights I have with the homeless become, basically, inevitable.

Fight #1 two weeks ago was with a homeless young man who told me there are tunnels two or three miles long running east under the town with portals for emerging beneath the Palace Hotel. He said he had pictures.

Sally told me today her home was taken from her, money, “dividends,” everything. She didn't know by whom. She didn't even say it was the “government.”

I liked that about her, by the way, that she didn't say it was “the government.” If you don't know who took your house and all your money, don't say you do. Sally didn't.

That's a thing I think I admire about the homeless, too, though it gets tedious quick: they stick to the personal and the real; to the slings and arrows shot from close range.

What I mean is, they never talk or walk down the street shouting things like “the military lied and painted a rosy picture to Congress year after year for twenty years about how Afghanistan was going.”

The homeless know life is lived in the shade when it's hot, that everything you own has to sometimes go in a cart, and that what is not there anymore is still real. Even if you make it up, it's still real.

But we hadn't fought yet, Sally and me. It had been maybe ten minutes and my patience had not yet worn thin, I guess.

She said people running a puppy mill had stolen her dogs. Come into her back yard and taken two of her dogs, first one and then the other. She said she saw the older dog later on TV. “Well,” I said….

Even in the great outdoors of a park in late summer or early Fall, whenever this is, the temperature between two strangers on opposite picnic table benches can drop pretty quick when one of them says, “Well….,” the way I said “Well….”. And when the other one is not exactly up for being doubted.

“Dogs can look pretty similar,” I said. “The dog on the British Dog show didn't have to be your dog.”

Still no fight, but Russian troops were suddenly on the borderline.

We didn't fight till she said there was a puppy mill right here in town. They use the homeless to watch the dogs and walk the dogs till they can be mailed off for big money. A guy who sits “right over there” was waiting for her to turn her head some day so he could snatch this dog like they did the other two out of her yard when she had a yard.

I could feel we were already over the edge.

She said I was calling her a liar. I said I just wanted her to check her facts.

Check your facts. That's how out of touch I am. We have two halves of a country shouting “check your facts” back and forth at the other half, and I'm fighting with a homeless woman I met ten minutes ago.

I'm fighting with a homeless woman I met ten minutes ago like I did my cousin till a year ago, when we stopped speaking all together.

All I require from people — I tell myself — is sound reasoning, the willingness to think critically, to expect there will be evidence of a thing, and to look at it.

And the homeless are not the only ones deficient in that.