The Landscaper
A man with long dark hair banded into a ponytail knelt over an overgrown patch of ground. He was landscaping with his bare hands and had filled three grocery bags full of weeds, grass, brush and branches.
I approached him carrying a cup of rotgut convenience store coffee. The sun was out and boxing with the clouds.
It was early Saturday morning, an atypical time for landscaping. What made the sight all the more atypical was the man wasn't working on a wild front yard; he was working inside a median about the size of a pool table that stood in the middle of a curvy intersection and served as a traffic diversion and speed deterrent.
It was a median that I drove past almost every day and had often remarked aloud that its overgrown status created a dangerous blind spot for drivers turning onto a busy commercial boulevard. I'd almost been wiped out there myself.
Well, at long last, someone was cleaning it up and it obviously wasn't an employee from the city's transportation department.
This man was older, bearded and evinced the unmistakable appearance and vibe of a homeless person. Of course, the same thing could have been said about my appearance and vibe on this particular Saturday morning: I was wearing a 50-year-old JC Penny plaid cloth jacket, 40-year-old frayed Levi's brown corduroys, a generic plaid flannel shirt made in China with threadbare suede patches, second-hand running shoes courtesy of a dead uncle, and a grimy gray stocking cap. I was also unshaven and my hair was long and unkempt. I might have even walked with a slight limp...old age you know?
Yeah, I bet more than a few people people driving by must of thought: that poor gimp homeless man in mismatched clothes, and terrible 7-11 coffee. Jesus, I should get him a Starbucks!
Who was this man who took landscaping a tiny plot of public space into his own hands?
I stopped on a sidewalk across from the median and called out to him, “Hey, thanks for cleaning that spot up!”
He turned to me and said, “Am I in the right place?”
“The right place?” I hesitated for a moment, then added, “Sure you are!”
“They called me,” he said.
“Who's they?” I was thinking the neighborhood association might have set up some kind of beautification program and hired some homeless men.
“The voices in my head,” he said, and he was clearly not joking by the way he said this.
“Then you must have the right place,” I said. “Do you live in the neighborhood?”
“I've lived here my whole life. I pick up garbage and cans.”
“Well, I appreciate your work. That blind spot there is dangerous.”
“What else can I do on such a beautiful morning? I'm 64 years old!”
I thanked him again and he roared, “It's fine thing to do something like this for people walking by with their coffee in the morning.”
He went back to landscaping and I headed on my way.
The next morning I walked by the median and it was spotless. I also encountered the landscaper again, near a park. He was picking up garbage with a claw-like tool. I meandered toward him and struck up a conversation about his handiwork. He was going to clean up another overgrown median and plant flowers. He always referred to himself in the third person plural, “we,” although he was doing the work alone.
“I don't have any kids,” he said as I walked away. “We want to leave the streams and rivers clean for the next generation.”
At that moment, it occurred to me: the third personal plural is an excellent pronoun to approach solving the homeless crisis.