Warm Hat for a Homeless Person

"Warm Hat" for a Homeless Person

Today's homeless person is far less likely to be expressing a love of freedom. Unable to find a place in the nation's social, employment, housing, legal, or health care economies, she or he doesn't even achieve the tramp's stature of a national threat – let alone the romance of the hobo.

Down at the vanishing point in public awareness, there's an existential nobodyness that no knit hat or sleeping bag can drive out of your bones.

And where the open road is out of reach, seasonal migration is reduced to cold-weather trundling from park bench or public library to winter emergency homeless shelter.

Many homeless people work, so daily migration replaces seasonal migration – perhaps to a steady job in the service sector that doesn't pay enough for housing, or to day labor.

And if not to work, then to a soup kitchen, a medical clinic, or a McDonald's. Then back for a 4 p.m. check-in at a "low-barrier" shelter. It's hard to find time for work in a life like that.

Nonetheless, homeless people live their lives as fully as anyone with a mortgage and a paycheck. They follow the same sports teams and news headlines. And like everyone else, they hope to build a life and do better in the future.

—David Hammond