One Step Away
I was reading about the middle-class homeless in the United States this morning and I remembered a woman who used to ride the same bus to work as I did. She was probably in her late 40s and I'm guessing worked somewhere at Queen's Park. Her attire was business/professional, hair all done, nails manicured, expensive footwear whether it was a pair of sleek leather boots or open-toed high-heeled sandals.
One day, on my lunch break, a hobbled old bag lady approached me for money. It took me a minute, then I realized it was her. That was when I also realized she hadn't been on the bus for a while. Anyway, I looked down at her feet for some reason, and her toes were hooked, like bird claws, over what appeared to be makeshift sandals of carboard, string and masking tape.
I was in my early 20s then, and that experience really drove home the message that we're all just one step away from disaster. Still, I rationalized that she must have had some pretty serious shit happen to her to go from working professional to bag lady.
Then the bus strike happened last winter in Ottawa and I was walking three hours per day to and from my contract job in the government. I got run down (not literally, although several drivers certainly tried their damndest) and the next thing I knew, I'd picked up some kind of virus that affected my hearing. For a while, I couldn't hear anything out of one ear. A couple of times, I had vertigo, too. It only lasted about an hour, but that "not knowing up from down" feeling makes for one long hour. One day, I was at lunch with a co-worker meeting her former co-workers, one of whom offered me a ride downtown after work. All during lunch I had to keep asking, "pardon?", and I could feel myself panicking about how odd they must think I was. I'd explained what was wrong but I guess because I looked fine and was faking good humour about the whole thing, everyone around me had just assumed it wasn't a big deal.
But it was. And I only took the ride home once because I just felt so awkward and out of it that I decided it was easier to walk home than to put myself (and others) through the social tension of a shared ride downtown a second time. It was easier for me, by far, to forego that ride in favour of an hour and a half walk home through unplowed sidewalks - at the end of a working day, and a day which started with an hour and a half trudge in to the office. And now that I'm in a better frame of mind, I can tell you that I was the only one feeling the tension. The people around me were mildly concerned, but assuming it would go away in due course, and in the meantime just going about their business as usual.
I was in a complete state of panic with paranoia on the rise and my fight or flight response on high alert. Partly because I sensed in those few weeks how close it can come to everything completely falling apart - for me, anyway. I have no illusions about my ability to cope with adversity.
And I don't think it matters how it happens, whether it's illness, bad luck, or the government's failure to regulate the financial industry. The fact is it can happen to anyone and that's the lesson I think we all should take away from the middle-class homeless in the United States.
They aren't the exception, they're the rule. Homelessness can be just one step away from having everything no matter who you are.
