Homeless

It's really hard to feel too sorry for yourself in this city. For one thing, it's just a fun place to be and I feel lucky to be here (crappy bookstore job aside). For another, there is always someone worse off than you trundling up the street with a supermarket trolley full of plastic bags, thrift store clothes and glass bottles. Homelessness is a terrible, scandalous problem. Desperate people beg at intersections, holding weathered cardboard signs explaining that they are wounded veterans, or AIDS patients, or simply hungry. They congregate in the Tenderloin (the city's worst neighborhood, the place where the cheapest prostitutes do their business) and near City Hall, and along Market St and down by Fishermans Wharf.
My drive to work takes me under a freeway overpass where there is a homeless community (carboard boxes, dumpsters, blankets rolled up and waiting for occupants), a heaving mass of suffering, but the person who breaks my heart is a thin woman who appears to be in her 50s and shakes constantly. She has a pair of sunglasses which she wears whatever the weather and she doesn't approach cars like the other folk. She just stands on the median strip and quivers from the cold, or DTs, or Parkinsons, and holds onto her dignity as best she can.
It's not just the "bad" neighborhoods that attract the homeless. We live in a very affluent area, home of yoga mommies and Bentley daddies and some of the most beautiful, manicured homes I've ever seen. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lives here. The Korean embassy is here. And there are homeless people here. I often see a woman with a cart (I think those are the lucky ones; they can amass belongings) when I am walking to the gym or the video store. She wears so many clothes and hats you can't actually see her face. There is a mute man who sits outside the boutique-style grocery store down the road with a clean cup outstretched. I always give him a dollar and am rewarded with a smile, a wave, and what seems like an attempt to make a sound. He is very sweet and I worry about where he goes at night.
We have taken to carrying dollar bills everywhere we go because it is too horrible to be caught short. I don't even really care if they are collecting the money to buy crack or beer. Who am I to decide where they seek comfort? It is awful enough seeing stray dogs wandering the streets, but humans who live out there -- some in wheel chairs, with crutches, one amputee who rolls through the traffic in his chair like someone who just doesn't care anymore -- it is not acceptable in a wealthy, First World city.