On the Homeless

As much as a desperately want to move to The City, I'm definitely a born-and-raised suburban boy.

Today, I mistook a homeless man for a bear.




There's only one homeless person in my neighborhood, and–in my defense–he's a pretty dark shade of black and was wearing a big black and brown coat with a dark hat, and was hunched over his piled shopping cart full of whatevers.

Still, he lives on that street corner. When I leave for work in the morning he's tidying up his grocery cart, and when I come home he's sweeping up the corner parking space where he sleeps. If anything belonged on that corner, it was not a bear.

But I thought 'bear' because I have way more experience with bears than itinerants.

When I was a kid, we had one year with a rash of bear sightings nearby, and my mother said to me, "Dave … do you know what to do if you see a bear?"

She never quizzed me on what to do if I came across the dispossessed.

Plus, I've been to the zoo. They haw beats you can look at there. You're never suppose to loo at the homeless.