BitterSweetLife

Saturday night, Lindsay and I were walking up the downtown block to our loft apartment when we were approached by one of our resident homeless guys. He came striding up behind me like they do, “Hey, man—” and I readied myself for the encounter. I must have looked more suburban and less collegiate than usual, because generally they take one look and then don’t bother.

Fortunately, my ingrained street smarts (gained by countless hours of blacktop hoops) must have been in evidence. They guy huffed up next to me and said, “Hey, if I could ask you a question…before you clip me with that two-liter…” Amusingly, his instincts weren’t bad, because when we’d seen the guy soliciting a couple of people up ahead, I’d tightened my grip on a mostly-full bottle of A&W Root beer. Nice heft.

We listened obligingly to his story, which was more imaginative than some, and rewarded his muse with a couple of oranges. As usual, the delivery of food (in response to a story about arriving on a train, desperately hungry) was met with mild surprise. However, the proffered oranges were taken with goodwill and we parted ways.

No doubt there’s a moral here, like Strong drink can be useful in some contexts, but what stands out was the guy’s inability to improvise. Surely there’s a lesson here about creativity, or the lack thereof. What should you expect when you approach a couple who are obviously on their way home from a picnic—bowl of potato salad, a grocery sack, a 2-liter—and say your friends are hungry? Really, a more innovative approach was in order, like the one about how the car battery died and some change to make a phone call would solve everything.

Chalk up yet another case of wheezing imagination.