Like Sunday Morning

I was in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood the other day, and as I approached an intersection, I noticed an older woman dancing on the other side of the street. There was no music, no-one was singing; she just danced there, near a lamppost by the corner. As I was crossing the street, she stopped dancing, and stood in place, as if she was waiting for me.

"It's not easy," she said to me, as I stepped onto the sidewalk. "It's not easy being homeless. It's not like that Lionel Ritchie song." The old  Commodores' song came to mind almost immediately, and sat in the back of my head, waiting, while the woman continued to speak. She looked older than me, but that's the thing about homeless people; living on the streets ages them, so it's hard to guess their ages from looking at them.

"You be careful out here today, okay?" She then turned away from me, and I walked on. She hadn't asked for anything; which was good, because I hadn't brought anything to spare and my car was a few blocks away.

I walked on; I was meeting a friend. There were a few other homeless people nearby; I presumed that there were services for them of some sort in the building. One corner housed a city office, closed for the evening.

"You see, I've begged, stole and I borrowed," I sang gently to myself as I walked away. I didn't suspect the woman would be there when I came back through that way later. She wasn't. Neither were the others. I wondered if they'd found safe places to spend the night.

Having spent the early part of my adult life in Chicago, I wasn't as acquainted with homelessness as I am now, living here. The climate there was much less forgiving, especially in the winter. I can understand why people here both see the problem as insurmountable, and expect the city and county governments to fix it anyway. It's that desire for someone else to bear the costs, of course, that stands in the way of the necessary trade-offs to reduce the number of people on the street. Such, of course, is the way of things.