Finding His Way Back Home
Taking care of my local community
I heard him ask the person he'd stopped if they knew where a street was, but I couldn't make out the name. The person shrugged and moved on, so he shuffled into the crosswalk, stopped just before reaching the corner, and turned and stared north.
"Are you lost?"
My dog Ginger and I were on our last walk of the night.
He answers me with a question of his own: "Do you know where Wallen Avenue is? I know it's around here somewhere."
I don't, and I rarely carry my phone when I walk my dog, but he looked ... so small in his oversized jacket with his little purple Metro bag and big black shoes with velcro straps instead of laces
I stop a person walking past and ask if they could map Wallen Avenue for me, and at first we thought he was several miles from home, but after getting his exact address, we realize he’s just several blocks north of his apartment.
"Do you have family that's worried about you?" I ask him.
I imagined kids out searching, but he brushed me off with a flick of his hand and the slightest chuckle that was less about something being funny and more about not understanding why I would ask such a thing.
"No, I don't have any family. Just roommates."
His roommates weren't very nice to him, he tells me, but he can't make rent on his own and some other friends had connected him with these folks. I ask how he'd gotten to this area of the neighborhood and he told me some friends brought him. He needed a new phone, his old one had been broken or lost, he didn't know.
"My memory is going," he tells me. "But the doctors, I don't know what they do."
When I ask he guesses he's been wandering for two hours. I tell him I'll get him an Uber but I need to run home and get my phone. "Stay on this corner for me," I tell him. "Do you need some water or anything?"
No, no water.
I have no idea how Uber works so I yell for Ben as I step into the house, rushing him out of the house as I try to explain. The man is still sitting on a fire hydrant when we get back.
Ben puts his address into Uber and orders a car.
"Do you have a pen?"
I want to give him my number so if he's lost he has someone to call, but he doesn't have anything to write with and neither do I.
"I can give you my number," he tells me, but as I'm asking Ben to put his information in his contacts he remembers he's carrying his new phone in the bag in his hand. "Oh, the number won't be the same," he realizes.
The Uber pulls up and I tell him, more in desperation than anything, that if he's ever lost in this area to remember Lunt and Paulina, the cross streets where we're now standing. I don't know how I think that knowledge will serve him; I suppose I hope I'll be there waiting somehow.
"Paulina," I hear him repeat as he moves toward the car.
I open the car door and tell the driver again where he's going.
He shuffles in and I close the door, knock three times on the window and put my hand flat against the glass in what I'm hoping he'll see as a sign of human connection, of someone seeing him in this world and caring that he makes it home.
He puts his own hand up to match mine.
There are times when I can't get my head or heart around this nation. The mass shootings. 1 million+ dead from a mismanaged pandemic. Election deniers still litigating the 2020 election. State after state after state forcibly erasing trans kids. Police murdering Black young men and women over and over and over.
But, I can love my community.
I can make sure I am a person who actively creates the world they want to live in every. damn. day., no matter how hard that feels sometimes.