True Homeless Stories
The Story of Howard, 59
Published: May 24, 2009
Howard sits in a wheelchair on an overcast day in the city. His arms lay folded in his lap, paper cup in hand. He carries all that he owns in a compartment in the back of his wheelchair. His umbrella protrudes from behind his shoulder in case he’s caught in a downpour. He’s a kind man with a warm demeanor.
The jeans on his left leg fold beneath his knee where his leg was amputated three months ago. He had a staph infection in his bone and they had no choice.
Prior to the amputation he was very active. He taught karate at two different schools in the city and is a third-degree black belt. As a young man, he loved to dance, ran track and was an excellent halfback for the Newcastle Raiders football team.
Three weeks ago he was outside of his apartment in North Philadelphia. A man approaches and asks if he has change for a twenty. He doesn’t think anything of it and takes out his envelope where he keeps his money, a little over seven hundred dollars. The man grabs it and he’s never seen again.
Without money to pay his rent, he had to leave his apartment after two weeks. Sometimes he sleeps in parking garages, sometimes in movie theaters, and when it’s cold, he tries to gather the money to stay inside.
We enter a shopping mall and I take a seat on the top of several stairs. We talk for nearly two hours on an exhaustive range of topics, but what strikes me most is his philosophical bent. He explains to me how he thinks dreams are real because they can be indistinguishable from waking life. “There’s nothin’ no more real than a dream,” he says. “You act out in a dream - your movements, your sweat ... the whole nine yards. Until you wake up, [that’s] only when you find it to be a dream. ... That’s why I believe that [dreams are] far more spiritual than man accepts.” “[Dreams are] God’s way of showing us that there’s life after death. ... Now where you go, and all that other stuff, I don’t know,” he says with a laugh.
He also explains to me the difference between knowledge and wisdom. He’s upset that we focus so much on scientific knowledge and not enough on widsom, or how to live life and make the right decisions. And he thinks that this lack of wisdom is the reason why there is so much chaos in the world.
I become concerned that I’m keeping him too long, and tell him how much I’ve enjoyed the conversation. He asks what I have in my plastic bag, and I tell him it’s half of my lunch that I didn’t eat. I offer it to him and he becomes elated. He hasn’t eaten in hours. On the train ride home, it begins to rain. Howard’s expression of gratitude unfolds clearly in my mind.
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