I think her name was June, but I'm not really sure. I was working in my dad's newsstand in North Philadelphia the first time I saw her. It's one of those images that gets burned into your brain, and surfaces from time to time and makes you feel sad- she was old to me, mid thirties or so, dressed in rags and thin as a scarecrow. She was crossing the street after she bought a pack of cigarettes from me and she turned and smiled as though we were old friends. I was only fifteen or so, virtually ignorant to the ways of the modern world, and here I was feeling a deep affection for a homeless woman. She had such an overwhelming grace and elegance about her that she seemed to transcend the dirty street and passing taxi cabs. I thought she was beautiful.
I worked in a middle class neighborhood that edged some extremely impoverished areas. Drugs and alcoholism are rampant, as is the omnipresent graffiti. There was a home for mentally ill people down the street, and during the day they were locked out. Most of them ended up at the Burger King restaurant across the street from the newsstand, or on the benches in front of it, begging for change to buy cigarettes or lottery tickets. June would come up to the newsstand and ask for her Salem 100's in a quiet, polite voice. While she was waiting, she would discreetly put her hand over her mouth so others wouldn't see her talking to herself. She would sit at the Burger King for most of the day, smoking and drinking her coffee. Unlike most of the Burger King homeless regulars, she never begged for money. she just sat quietly and mumbled to herself with a look of extreme concern on her face. She had a certain elegance about her, unlike the haggard, sullen look that most of them had. She almost seemed like a regular customer there sometimes.
When I went to college, I forgot all about the newsstand, and the world of the Burger King homeless. After I graduated, however, I found myself back at the newsstand while I was looking for a job. She wasn't around as much as she used to be, but she still came by from time to time for her cigarettes. I was working with a guy named Steve, and one day, Steve and I started talking about her. He said that she had lived in the apartment upstairs from him for several years. When she was home, he said, she spoke out loud to herself for much of the night, often keeping him awake. He said that her voice took on three distinct personalities. She sometimes sounded like a man, sometimes like a child, and sometimes like herself. He said that for a long time he actually thought that there was a whole family up there, until his landlord told him the truth. Her apartment was paid for by her sister, after she had gone insane several years before. She had been a school teacher at one time, but she was the victim of a vicious rape and had lost her mind. She wouldn't stay in the apartment these days, Steve said, so her sister stopped paying the rent for it. As she slipped more and more out of her faculties, she slipped out of society. Nobody knows where she stays now, but she appears from time to time, looking as though she hasn't bathed in a while or gotten any new clothes, but she still doesn't ask for any money.
I don't think about her much anymore, but from time to time, that image of her crossing the street will come back to me and move me to sadness. These days, I'm so desensitized to the plight of others that I regard them as an annoyance of the city, because they are an anonymous group labeled "bums" or "homeless". They are not like us, not at all, some will say. All they want is a free ride, money to buy drugs or wine, or that they make more money begging that you do at your job. Maybe some of that is true, but maybe they're people who have been where you are now. Maybe something went wrong in their life and they lost control to the point where they can't handle responsibility any more. Maybe if you look at them with the eyes of a younger person, you'll see that they are not a "they" at all, they are really "us" under different circumstances.
