Out on my early morning walk a block or so from home, I saw an older homeless man pooping into a trash bag just outside of the Starbucks. The man had lived there on the sidewalk for several weeks, usually just a lump covered in an old dirty blanket. I had only seen his face a time or two.
I had heard that he was about my age and also like me, a Navy veteran. I thought a lot about that man on my walk that morning and how, since serving our country long ago, our paths diverged so profoundly.
I thought about what causes a person to have nowhere to live and the longer I walked that morning, the more I felt somehow involved. I started to think about the time I bought my house over 20 years before. It had been a rental with two families living in it, but soon thereafter, only me. I’ve heard it called gentrification, but to me, it was just a great deal in a run-down, crowded downtown neighborhood, a few minutes’ walk to State Street. It made me feel better that I had remodeled the place and contributed to what I thought was a needed revitalization.