An Encounter of the homeless in Seattle

The unusually sunny Seattle sky greeted us as we walked out the airport and waited for the bus to the downtown for the reserved rental car. It was an August noon of 2008 perhaps, our first trip to Seattle. My daughter was then a middle school girl, who we took with to Seattle and Vancouver family summer vacation.

The expected big bus came and halted on the curb. We boarded the crowded bus from the rear door. No obvious empty seats were in sight.  So, we stood next to the entrance, with one hand tending to the carryon luggage, and the other gripping tightly to a bar, as the bus started moving and joggling along. Coming from a state where public transportation is least developed, we seldom took buses locally.  While I am familiar with sardined- like buses in my years in China, taking buses was not something my daughter was used to. I saw her curious eyes moving around, and instantly followed them.  The passengers in the bus were mostly nonchalantly looking, dozing or staring expressionlessly ahead.  When my eyes were searching through the crowd, a guy in his forties beckoned us smilingly from the rear rows, nudged himself a bit, and pointed to an empty seat by him. Without a second thought, I led my daughter to the seat and had her sit there.  As I secured my position against the side of the seat, I was able to look at him closely.  He had long black hair, some mustache under his mouth just as bushy and black.  His eyes gleamed with some humility and eagerness.  Nothing unusual until my eyes fell on the overcoat he worn on a summer day, and that the coat was smeared with grease.  Resting upon the equally dirty pants were his two filthy hands, each fingernail long and black.  It was only then did it occur to me that he was a homeless man. No wonder he had an empty seat by his side, no wonder people around chose to stand! I thought to myself, and for a moment, I was regretful of the move, worrying about the possible fleas he could contagiously carry.

It was his kindness that radiated from his eyes and the talkativeness that made me not pull my daughter off the seat. He talked incessantly, asking us questions as where we were from and what we were going to do in the city. When knowing that we were from California, he relayed the topic to the sunny state, and began telling his story.  The conversation between him, my daughter and me continued as the buses moved towards the hustling downtown.  Around twenty minutes later, he stood up to get off at bus, a stop in the downtown, where he was going to spend the day with his fellows, loitering away as he had been doing every day.

I had never expected that the first person we met and talked to on our Seattle trip was a homeless stranger. Neither had I anticipated that this encounter enabled my daughter to produce an essay for her college application five years later.  While I was laden with the worry of fleas, I did not attend carefully to the babbling talk of the homeless man. But my daughter’s essay written five years later recollected the conversations that I was not aware of.  Her choice of submitting that essay as one of her college applications surprised me, in which she spoke of her awakening growth, as she tried to understand the struggle of the homeless, which she would have never bothered to care.

Reading John Steinbeck’s travelogue reminded me of this trip, and her essay.  Life is a journey. As she later left home and the bubble city for the college, in her first year, almost every day she had to pass by a park on the campus, where a group of the homeless clustered for the night. And I, a mom who worried about her safety after her night classes, attempted to remind her to avoid the homeless people. But she took it into her stride, saying that they were nice, however filthy and vulgar they might look outside.  I later attributed her fearlessness to her first encounter of the homeless in Seattle,  as she knew that we don’t always judge people by the appearance.