Stocking Cap

Elmer the husky and I strolled around the park on a Monday afternoon. It was cold and dry with a bit of breeze whipping through the trees.

A few minutes earlier we had stopped and I had a pleasant conversation with Perry, a homeless man in his late 60s who lives out of a kind of Conestoga wagon parked in front of an apartment building. He picks up trash all day long and I always tip him a few bucks when I see him working.

Perry was in fine spirits and he asked me my history of coming to the neighborhood. I told him about my father in assisted living. He asked how much that cost and when I shared the amount, he cursed. He admired Elmer. We said something about the park and then Elmer and I went along.

Thirty yards away a homeless woman on a bicycle was stopped in the parking lot. She had her possessions strapped across her back and the bicycle, an old mountain bike model. One of the possessions was a large metal pail.

She saw me and Elmer approaching and said hello and said what a good looking dog.

I asked her how she was doing and she said all right with a smile. I put her in her 30s or 40s. She wasn't addled in any way.

We said goodbye and Elmer and I continued on to my car, roughly 50 yards away.

I loaded Elmer into the car and turned around to see the woman bicycling toward us, very slowly, a little ungainly. It was then I noticed she wore no hat and it was 40 degrees with colder temperatures forecast for the coming days.

Give her one of your extra stocking caps, I thought.

I called out to her, “Hey could you use a stocking cap?”

She rode up to me and stopped.

“Sure,” she said.

I dug out a real beauty—a hand knitted one, brown, green, orange, floppy, groovy, purchased from a real knitter at a craft fair over a decade ago. It was my emergency stocking cap and here was an emergency.

I gave her the cap.

“Wow, this is really nice,” she said, pulling it on, then pulling it down low. It looked good on her. Very 70s chic.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You are welcome. Be careful out there.”

She rode away, but not before making a subtle adjustment to the cap.

I felt good. It always feels good to give new purpose to an item that needs a new one and give it away to someone in need. It costs nothing.