I commute to work by train and bus, from one city center to a suburb of a smaller city. The train stations are sites of uncomfortable interaction between people who have a home to travel from and a place to travel to, and those who are shipwrecked and hoping the station will provide some temporary harbor. For more than a year, I’ve been doing this dance with a man who used to work at my job.

This man, whom I’ll call Ed, was someone I would see in the halls when he was assigned to my building. We would exchange pleasantries. Sometimes he asked about my work, or shared a newspaper article he found interesting. I once visited a church that he attended, and after that, he sometimes told me about his Bible studies. He was a conservative Christian with especially traditional views on gender and an interest in history.  He was one of many people I typically chatted with in the course of a week. When I didn’t see him after a while, I thought little of it.

The first time I saw him in the train station, I assumed he was a passenger on his way somewhere. It was the neatly packed shopping cart that gave me pause. “Ed?” He acknowledged me with a smile and a shrug. Yes, he was living in the streets, he said. No, he wasn’t working. There had been some sort of break with his family, and so he was on the streets. He didn’t feel safe in the shelter, he told me. Too many people drinking, cursing, doing drugs – “and you know I’m not used to that,” he said. His Bible was his refuge. 

Over time, during brief interludes between bus and train, Ed has offered little nuggets about surviving on the streets. There are optimal times to go to the soup kitchen if you want a decent meal as opposed to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You have to time your visits to the library as well if you want to use a computer. You need access to a computer to apply for jobs. Don’t use the restrooms in the train station after a certain time of night, he warned, because you might come across drug users. If you ever find yourself discouraged, you can use one of the pay phones to make a free call for prayer.

Early on, I would buy him a sandwich if I was getting something. Sometimes he would offer me coupons for the fast food restaurants in the station. He tells me that he doesn’t need money for food – it’s housing he can’t afford.  He would work, but jobs are scarce for men over 50 who have only done manual labor. He can’t work like that anymore, anyway. He tells me that the social service agencies say the only way he can get subsidized housing is if he cops to a mental illness that he insists he doesn’t have.

He’s not asking me to fix it. He says he appreciates being able to talk to someone who knew him before he found himself adrift.

All of this brings me to what happened tonight. Our paths crossed in the station, and we stopped for a brief chat. He told me had briefly been in the hospital. I offered to pray for his recovery.

I was about to take my leave and two police officers approached. You know you aren’t allowed here, one of them said. I tell the officer, I know him. I used to work with him.  I understand, one of the officers here, but other passengers have complained about him, and he’s been ordered to stay out of this building. They told Ed that he would be arrested if he came into the station again. As he walked away, Ed said some police officers were kinder to him than others. Pray for me, he said. It’s getting cold.

I don’t have any deep insight or grand conclusions to draw from Ed’s story. I don’t know what happened on his job, or with his family that contributed to his circumstances. I don’t know what interactions he might have had that led to the police officers’ actions. I know this was someone who drove his car to work every day, and had a home to go to at night. Now he’s risking arrest to have a conversation with an acquaintance.

Ed by Kim Pearson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.