When you see people on the street, what do you think? Most people don’t like to give people money. They think you will use it to get high or drunk. So they give you a quarter or dollar. Then there are people who give you food. This is good, but most people try to give you health food and when you are homeless you need the heavy food because you don’t know when you are going to eat again.
The homeless need just about everything you can think of. Clothes, shelter, medical and spiritual. That is what they need, not necessarily what they want. We want to feel like we are helping ourselves. To have pride in ourselves. That’s why some homeless sell Street Sense; it is a job when you don’t have one. A way to help yourself. So please remember we know what we need: short term things when we are hungry or raggedy, then a goal to be self-sufficient.
Being homeless and selling Street Sense in the cold, you come to think of the cold as a large, mortal enemy. It’s as if you were a cartoon and the cold is chasing you. The enemy is always close, it is around every corner. Sometimes you get brave and say I am not going to run, and you devise a plan to fight back. One plan is to drink a hot beverage and put Ma Cold down, but if you drink too much coffee you get hyper; that also goes for sweet drinks. Not to mention it leads to the bathroom!
Ma Cold waits until you got it all down and then jumps back up only this time you are all jittery. Then you say I know: I’ll go inside every fifteen minutes or so. This is a good plan to fight the cold, except Ma Cold knows that the heat of the inside is so comfortable that you find yourself thinking about the warmth of the inside when you are outside . . . and then fifteen becomes twenty minutes. Then you find yourself not getting that many sales in. The reason you are out in the cold in the first place is to get sales.
Then you start the mental battle. You say to yourself, “I have no choice. I have to work to help myself.” You go along with this for a couple of hours . . . until the cold feels relentless again. Then you go through the whole gamut of emotions: happy, sad, tired, sleep; and all to get right back to what it is: COLD! So you start the same thing over again. Drink hot stuff. Sit inside, tell yourself you must survive. Until at the end of the day you feel like you did hard labor instead of just selling papers. In the cold, selling the paper takes your whole physical and mental energy.
Give me a job on the inside any day! Until I can do better, I’ll stick with Street Sense and keep fighting Ma Cold.
