We like eating "egg hole" sandwiches and Campbell's tomato soup with Kraft cheddar melted into it. We like getting the end-of-shift produce from the back of the Farmer's Market once a week for salads and omelet stuffing. We like Ripple and Annie Green Springs wine.
There are others whose poverty is not voluntary. These are the ones we call beggers. Whose poverty is poverty, homelessness, job loss, despair and what was not yet called PTSD. One is the man with no legs who scoots around on a little cart, the old woman whose heavy woolen coat drags through the slush on the sidewalk behind her as she walks heavily from door to door. A few tattered souls at the Park St. Station where the redline disgorges passengers each morning and scoops them up again at dusk. They have no homes, the have no names. They hold their cups or sometimes hats out for pedestrians to donate to their cause. In the winter there is stiff competition from the Salvation Army and others with donation boxes and signs that are made by machine, not scribbled in crayon.
Then there is this guy:
He stands outside the entrance to Filene's basement, the one on the corner of Washington St. across from Jordan Marsh. They are the two main department stores in Boston. I see him every evening as I climb the stairs from the second basement to the street. He leans on one crutch, clutched with one gnarled hand, mittenless, so every knuckle shows knobby white. the other arm outstretched supported by a heavy metal brace of some kind. In his outstretched hand he holds a metal cup.
He could be anywhere from his mid forties to mid-seventies. Dirty gray hair covers his face, long strands whipped by the wind, matted beard and mustache obscuring chin and mouth.
The hairy man with the crutch is there all winter. He thrusts out his stiff arm; shoppers drop in coins or sometimes dollar bills; or just pass him by; he never speaks.
Today is Christmas Eve. Filene's basement turns into bedlam. Gail and I give up folding and refolding and just stand behind our counters. People pay us for merchandise or they don't. Security guards dressed as Santas smoke behind pillars and drink from flasks they keep in pockets tucked under their giant beards. Or we imagine they do. We make up stories about them, that they live in a sub-sub basement, in warrens beneath the subway, that they sneak in at night and change all the displays and cavort naked in the aisles. Why not? Regular customers do the same thing.
