On a Saturday back in 2003, I pushed my children, ages two and four, in a double stroller down Broadway Avenue in Seattle. Up ahead I saw a man in a doorway. He lay in a sleeping bag, facing away from the street. How did you end up here? I wondered. Where is your family? Will you survive the winter rain? I tried to imagine having a paper cup half full of change and that being all that I owned. How long would I make it out here? I thought of my children living on the street and picked up the pace, hoping they didn’t notice this man curled up on a piece of cardboard. But the kids, who saw everything, asked questions. Now I had to explain how there were people in this world who had no home to return to, and that we were going to respond to this reality by pushing past it. I felt ashamed to be an adult. I was supposed to be a role model for my children. I was supposed to teach them Please and Thank You and Treat Others with Respect and Kindness, yet here I was passing the doorway as if this person did not exist. That was the beginning of the children’s education, their first lesson in how to treat people living on the street. I feel badly and then quickly move along. I say it’s a terrible thing, and then head into the store to buy dinner.

For years after that Broadway morning, I noticed people living on the street just long enough to step around them. It was as though getting too close would make their lives rub off on me. Then I met Clayton.

On a Tuesday in 2019, dogs barked and darted back and forth. Adults held leashes and talked in clusters.

“You can do this!” a woman yelled. Seven pairs of arms bent and straightened in a row of pushups. Heavy breathing.

A jet rumbled overhead. I looked up at the April sky. Low-hanging clouds stretched to the horizon.

“Hello, sir,” a cheerful voice called out.

I noticed and ignored all of this. I focused on the watch ticking on my wrist. My daughter was late for high school. We had walked two blocks from our house, and now followed a loose line of commuters cutting through the playfield—some held coffee, others briefcases.

Three runners circled the field. Beyond them, a handful of resting bodies scattered against the fence line. Some were covered in blankets, others with pieces of cardboard.

“Hello, sir.” Again the cheerful voice. It had the deep, slightly gravely timbre of someone who smoked.

I looked up to see a man wearing a baseball cap sitting on the bench in the corner of the field, backpack and sleeping bag by his side. An overgrown gray beard and dark mustache covered half his face but could not hide a growing smile. His frayed coat and pants hung loose over his body, covering a slight frame and narrow shoulders. When he stood up, he looked to be just over five feet. His body type was the same as mine except I was a foot taller.

“Hello, sir.” He waved at me.

I gave a nod and kept moving.

At the end of the day, I met my daughter at school and we followed the reverse route across the playfield. Again, there was the bearded man, and again, “Hello, sir.”

This happened the next day and the next. He said “hello” as if we were old friends, as if to say, “What luck to keep running into you!” I responded with a blank stare. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. Looking back, if someone sitting on the playfield eating ice cream with friends ran up to me and said, “hello”, or one of the soccer players waved at me three days in a row, would I ignore them?

I look for reasons to connect with people in the neighborhood:

“Nice hat.”

“Love the color of your coat.”

“Wow, look at those shoes!”

Anything to disrupt this feeling of moving through strangers. If the man with the beard had been someone in the park who did not appear to be homeless, I would have returned the greeting.

“He’s only talking to you,” my daughter said one morning on the way to school.

“What?”

“He’s not saying hello to the others.” She pointed to the people crossing the field behind and ahead of us.

That was when I woke up and started to notice the man.

❖

My daughter and I played a game called Bodyguard. Every two weeks, she carried her earnings from working at a restaurant to the bank. It was my job to protect her on the way, even though she was stronger and faster than me. Normally, she felt comfortable walking this route on her own, but depositing hundreds of dollars in cash from tips made her uneasy. We stood back-to-back at the automatic teller. She inserted the money; I faced the street to make sure all was well.

It was in early July, while making one of those deposits, that I saw the man with the beard. He stood at the corner next to the grocery entrance and waved at me. He wore dirty pants and a stained shirt. He looked like he hadn’t bathed in days. Homeless people are not supposed to be this happy, I thought, and yet there he was, smiling and waving. I waved back.

He approached me and said, “Hello.”

“Hi there, I’m Stokley,” I said and shook his hand.

“I’m Clayton. What’s going on?”

“It’s my birthday.”

“Well, happy fucking birthday,” he yelled. “How old are you?”

“Fifty-seven.”

“I’m fifty,” he said. He told me he had a wife and a daughter but didn’t know where they were.

I didn’t know what to say; I was trying to imagine not knowing my daughter’s whereabouts.

Walking home across the playfield, my daughter said, “I was making my deposit and saw a creepy man come near. I was nervous until I saw it was your friend.”

Friend? I wondered. He was friendly.

In my younger days, my father said, “You need to help the people in your path.” On the way to his office, he gave his spare change to the man sitting on the corner. “I hope that someday someone will do the same for me,” he said.

The evening of the bank deposit, I wrote in my notebook, “July 5, 2019: He lives in the park a couple of blocks away. I live in a big house that will grow even bigger in September when the kids move out.”

❖

As a kid, I would take a right out of our driveway and bicycle down the sidewalk along High Street to the center of Dedham, a town not far from Boston. I would park my bike and go in search of comic books at the newsstand. Some days, I would continue left on Washington, through the rotary and past the old garbage incinerator to the mall. Other days, I would turn right on Washington and go to the record store in the Plaza. On fall and spring mornings, I bicycled to school with my friends. On Sundays, my family rode down Chestnut Street past the town jail to church. I spent a childhood pedaling the streets of Dedham and not once did I see anyone sleeping on the side of the road or sitting on a sidewalk with a cardboard sign in their lap.

Everyone I knew slept with a roof over their heads in bedrooms with windows that overlooked cars parked in driveways. There must have been people in my town who went to sleep hungry; I just didn’t know them.

In the winter, on the occasional Friday, my wife and I would walk through the rain or snow, past Clayton’s bench, and into my favorite restaurant. We would hang up dripping coats just inside the entrance and follow the host across the room. We would sit on a bench that reminded me of an old church pew and order drinks. I would look at the other diners and listen to the kitchen clatter behind us. Steam, generated by the warm bodies, pressed against the glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was as if the world outside did not exist.

In the summer, lunch tables spilled out onto the sidewalk. What was a private dining experience behind closed doors moved into the public. Here, cutlery, cloth napkins, and specialty drinks rubbed up against life on the street. What separated the two were a few three-foot-tall posts connected by a thin line of rope. On one side of the rope, cigarette butts, leaves, and a broken windshield pressed into the gutter. A man yelled. Cars honked. Feet crushed a half-filled coffee cup, the stain expanding across the sidewalk. On the other side of the rope, the host would show us to a table. The waiter would take our order. We would say, “Please.” They would say, “Thank you.”

On the last Friday in July, a few weeks after Clayton and I had exchanged words at the ATM, my wife and I sat at an outdoor table that had a bench big enough for two. It faced down the sidewalk and offered a view of pedestrians as they approached. Our lunch arrived. For her, a salad. For me, a BLT. I was about to take a bite when I saw Clayton heading towards us. He saw me, smiled, and stopped at our table. I introduced him to my wife.

“I just finished sweeping at the cafe,” he said. The cafe was located just around the corner.

“You work there?” I asked.

“Now and then,” he said. “I’m heading to the park.”

The backs of his hands were marked with dirt. In my hand was half a sandwich.

I had seen this dance play out many times before: the destitute and the diners. A hand reaches out. Laughter and conversation stop. Diners struggle to ignore the outstretched hand. Awkward glances are exchanged. Diners wait for the moment to pass.

It was good to finally introduce Clayton to my wife, but I felt uncomfortable sitting there with our food as he stood. Had he eaten? I wondered. I didn’t offer; he didn’t ask.

The destitute approaches the diner because they want something. The diner then decides to dig into their pockets or look away. Clayton broke this pattern. He neither eyed our food nor talked about his troubles. In fact, he seemed to enjoy meeting my wife as much as I enjoyed introducing her. This was part of what drew me to him: how he disrupted my assumptions of how we were supposed to interact.

❖

I think of the people on Capitol Hill as part of my community. Clayton was one of those people, but how many times had I passed right by and not seen him? How many times had I walked past the bench in the park where he sat with a man on either side of him, drinking, laughing, and talking about his marriage?

Throughout the fall, I saw Clayton sleeping in the park. He lay on the ground with his head resting on his pack. He looks vulnerable, I thought. So exposed. I saw people sleep here every day and just walked past them, but this was different. I knew this person’s name.

❖

Clayton and I sat on a concrete ledge at the corner of the park. It had been just over a year since we first met. “I lost my wallet,” he said. “My wallet had everything in it, everything. My license. My benefits card. It had my daughter’s picture. Everything.” I felt a weight land on the word “picture.” Our living room shelves were filled with photo albums of our children at different ages. Framed family portraits sat on tables and hung on walls; my computer stored thousands of photos. I had countless images of my daughter. I tried to imagine having only one and then losing it.

“What was your old wallet like?” I asked.

“It was leather and had a chain,” he said.

“Did it have a zipper?”

“I made it myself.”

“You did?” Of course, he did. He made it while working at the Shoe Repair.

I had been wondering how to help Clayton, and this was a problem I could solve.

❖

In early May, Clayton and I leaned against the chain link fence outside the tennis court the skateboarders used. A man yelled in a doorway on the other side of the court.

“He’s been doing that all day,” Clayton said.

After the man in the doorway took a break from yelling, I asked Clayton, “Shall we try again to get your benefits back?” It had been two weeks since we ordered the benefits card and still no sign of it in the mail.

“Sure,” he said.

I called the benefits line, put the phone on speaker, and pushed through the prompts.

An agent said, “Hello.”

I said my name and explained that I was calling to help Clayton with his benefits card.

“Is he there with you?” the agent asked.

“Oh yeah,” Clayton said, leaning over my phone before I handed it to him. “My wallet was stolen two months ago.”

“So, you lost your card,” the agent said.

“Yes, I want my card. I need to eat.”

The agent asked questions. Clayton answered, giving her personal information that was none of my business. It was the wrong way to learn about his past, standing against a fence with the phone on speaker, and the man in the doorway yelling.

“What ethnicity are you?”

“I’m a white boy.” Clayton laughed and looked at me.

“Where do you live?”

“On the street,” he said. “I’m on a waiting list for housing. Number 147 on the list.”

After a few more questions, the agent said, “You should receive your benefits card within a week.”

“Oh, thank you, darling.” Tears flowed down Clayton’s face.

I was moved by his gratitude, his emotion, the weight he had to bear.

When speaking to the agent about where to mail the benefits card, Clayton and I agreed to use my address since he didn’t have one. A week later, a letter arrived for Clayton in my mailbox. I walked quickly to the courts, his bench, and then around the corner to the shuttered Starbucks. There he was at the streetcar stop, standing next to another man who took a swig out of a quart bottle.

Clayton pointed at me in greeting. I pointed back and handed him the envelope.

He opened it and brought out the letter.

The other man leaned in.

“Stay away from my stuff,” Clayton said to the man. He seemed to be kidding, but it was hard to tell. His attention was focused on the letter. The longer he looked, the more I worried, Maybe the card’s not in there.

Clayton opened the envelope again, reached in, and pulled out a card. He started crying.

I started crying.

“I love you,” he said.

“Love you,” I said.

Clayton extended his fist. I bumped mine against his.

He turned away to the wall. “I have my card,” he said, “I have my card.” He turned back around and sat on the ledge. He clasped his hands, raised them in the air, and looked up, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.”

❖

One afternoon, fifteen years ago, my family and I stopped for ice cream on the way home from an outing. I remember being in our car, waiting at a red light. My son, aged six, sat behind me. My daughter, aged four, was next to him. My wife sat next to me. Each of us quietly licked our cones. To our left, a man held a sign and stood on the sidewalk. Ideally, I would have passed quickly by him and turned left up the hill, or, if it was a red light, stopped eight cars back from the light, out of the man’s reach. The worst situation—this situation—was to be the first or second car idling at the light with the person right there outside my window, too close to ignore. I licked my cone. He stood with his sign. I stared at the light, waiting for it to change. Did he look at me? I wanted to look at him, but what if we made eye contact? I heard one of our car windows opening and turned around to see my son handing his ice cream to the man with the sign. In that moment, he gave away his pleasure; all the joy of that ice cream went out the window. It was an action I had not considered taking; and when I say not considered, I mean that in the hundreds of times I had stopped at that light, the thought never entered my mind.

Clayton met Gladys six years ago. For a couple of years, they slept in the park until 1 or 2 a.m. when the bars closed, then they moved over to the Unicorn Tavern’s doorway. In the morning, they crossed the street for coffee at Caffé Vita where Clayton knew everyone and stored his things.

A year after Gladys and I met and grew to know each other, she described a day during a snowstorm when she and Clayton walked down Broadway. There was a young kid barefoot and huddled in the street. “He was cryin’ and all wrapped up cold, wet,” Gladys said. “His mom kicked him out because he got messed up on drugs.” Gladys watched Clayton take off his shoes and hand them to the boy. “The kid was just so happy to put somethin’ on his feet because it was in the ice and cold.” Clayton then walked through the snow in his socks the half mile to the thrift store to get another pair of shoes for himself and a dry blanket to bring to the kid.

❖

When my daughter and I walked across the park to school and Clayton called out, “Hello, sir,” she pointed out that he only spoke to me. At that time, if I was brave enough to admit it, I would have said that a person in need makes contact to get something from you. A “Hello” was not a simple hello. No, it was the first step. Maybe this is why I did not notice him. I ignored the hello to avoid the conversation that would lead to him asking for something I would not give. Maybe that was why it took my daughter to direct my attention to this person.

Over the next year, his “Hellos” continued and I “Hello-ed” back. He said “Hello” when I passed him sitting at the bus stop. He said “Hello” as I left the grocery store. What impressed me was that in all that time, not once did he ask for something. He did not treat our encounters as means to an end. On the day that Clayton asked me how I was doing, as my daughter deposited money into the automatic teller machine at the bank and I told him it was my birthday, he didn’t say, “You’re putting money in the bank. Can you spare some for me?” No. He said, “Happy fucking birthday.”

❖

A photograph clipped from the New York Times sat on my desk. An aerial view of cars lined up on what looked like an old parking lot. Cars blue and red and black. A few doors were open. The rest were closed. The cars looked like our car, like the ones I saw every day. The caption read, “San Antonio. On Thursday, 10,000 families came to a swap meet hall for boxes of food. It would usually be 200 or 400.”

There were 10,000 families looking for food in San Antonio on that Thursday—the same day that Clayton, trying to get his food stamps, said to the agent, “I need to eat.”

After I had described Clayton’s situation to a friend, he pointed out the ways this could go wrong. “Does he know where you live?” he asked with shock in his voice. He was certain that Clayton played a long game. I had to be careful. He definitely wanted something. I understood my friend’s line of reasoning, because it mirrored my own impulse to stop at the red light, eat my ice cream, and ignore the man with the sign. But if Clayton played a long game, why didn’t he seek me out? He didn’t frequent my regular pathways to find me. When I passed through the park, he didn’t try to stop me or insist that I pay attention. Yes, he said “Hello,” but it was an open greeting, one that carried no demands.

I didn’t know any of the 10,000 families that lined up for boxes of food in San Antonio. But I did know that all over the country, all over my state, there were families in need. I knew that I had a home. More than a home, I had a refuge. For thirty years, I had returned to this place to rest and relax and feel myself. In this refuge I read about others who did not feel safe. I stepped out my front door and saw the tents. I watched as they multiplied on the blocks near my home.

I remember when I first noticed tents appearing on the side of the highway, twenty-five years ago, and when I first saw someone stand on an offramp holding a sign asking for donations. I remember seeing the first person sleeping in the park. Each of those moments landed with a thud, and then settled back to normal. That was my response to homelessness. It is upsetting, I thought, I should do something about it. Then I buried that feeling away in a small box.

10,000 families in San Antonio? I felt paralyzed. What to do with this information? It was a number too big to grasp, but Clayton was just one person and he needed a wallet. He needed so much more—a safe place to sleep, help navigating the city’s bureaucracy, and medical assistance. I wasn’t a doctor or a social worker. I had no skills to provide housing, but, thankfully, he also needed a wallet. This one problem allowed me to take a step towards him. It allowed me to participate in his crisis instead of looking away.

Over the course of a year, I went from responding to Clayton’s greetings to actively looking for him. When I found him sitting on his bench in the park or leaning against the shuttered Starbucks, I wasn’t sure how to act or what to do, so I asked, “What do you need?” He needed a place to receive his mail, so we had it forwarded to my house; he needed his benefits card, so we replaced it; and later, when he needed medicine, I tracked down his health provider. In all that time, it did not occur to me that I might need him more than he needed me. Maybe I was the one with the long game? Clayton’s friendliness kept me from looking straight ahead and waiting for the light to change. He invited me to stop and notice what I had overlooked, what was right there in my path. He shared stories about his family and introduced me to Gladys and others in his life. He helped me recognize the people living on the street as my neighbors.

Clayton’s Neighborhood