Homeless Part Deux

I don’t know what happened to the “homeless not hopeless” man I wrote about recently. I haven’t seen him since that day. I know he told me he was eating what he could get from local church pantry donation boxes and after the discussion we had, I went to a nearby Subway sandwich store and bought a gift card to give him. I carried it with me on my daily walks for days but never encountered him again. One of my friends emailed that he liked the idea so much, he was going to carry gift cards like that in his wallet, to distribute to people he found in a similar situation. So instead of my husband and I using the gift card ourselves, I stuck it in my purse, to do the same. Yesterday I was at a drugstore to get the new RSV vaccination. The store is located in a fairly busy suburban area, but when I pulled into a parking space just outside the store, there was a young man wrapped in a sleeping bag on the sidewalk under an overhang. The sleeping bag was a nice one and he didn’t look particularly disheveled but there he was, asleep and far from any park or even a grassy spot to camp comfortably. Once again, I was troubled. When I came out of the store after my shot, he was still there but this time he was awake. He appeared to be clean and clear eyed and not under any kind of influence. I got in my car but continued to be bothered by the man lying so close to my parking space. I remembered the Subway gift card in my purse, got out and approached him. “Are you okay?” I asked. “Yes,” he responded in a clear voice. “Are you hungry?” I asked next. “Yes,” came the response again. I pulled out the Subway gift card and offered it to him, feeling like the proverbial good Samaritan. “Would you like this gift card for Subway?” Without hesitation he shook his head and answered definitively, “No.”  I was surprised and a little down-hearted at my rejected attempt to be a do-gooder. “But thank you,” he said as I walked away. Was he in fact homeless at all? Was he someone who just enjoyed sleeping outside on a sidewalk? I don’t know anything more than I felt dissed by a seemingly homeless person. But if he was, he was one with good manners.

Image courtesy Gerd Altmann at Pixabay.com