You Make My Heart Sing

Whenever I saw Albert he said: "You make my heart sing." I would say, "I bet you say that to all the ladies". And he would say, "No, I really mean it. When I see you my heart sings." Albert did not mean it in a romantic sense. We have all heard the expression: "Misery loves company", but truthfully when we see miserable people we want to run for the hills. Living on the streets can create misery and most homeless people have a sob story. Or two or three. Albert spent most of his time among other homeless people who, having no place to go, hung around at Lincoln Park. They complained.

They complained about the food. Lumpy or watery oatmeal, no salt, pepper, sugar, butter or margarine to give it some flavor. Hard, stale bread and weeks old cookies or sugary donuts were a routine part of every meal. They complained about coffee actually being chicory and perhaps a packet of sugar would be doled out with watery powdered milk to dilute the bitter mixture. Little cartons of milk were often sour. Mass cooked eggs were a favorite as were the little sausages severed with them, even though heartburn was often an after affect of eating them. It was not unusual to see flies buzzing around the food as one waited to get served. Coach roaches scurrying across the floor in broad daylight made meals a horror.

Then I would come along and say something like, "Well it is better than nothing". It is amazing what people will eat when they are starving. Some homeless people claim to grab pigeons, kill and roast them. Mouth watering, some homeless people grab food off a store shelf and slip it quickly under their coat. Some do eat what they find in the trash. "McDonald's throws out all the unsold food after closing" they will say, and it does not seem to matter that non-food trash is in the black, plastic garbage bag they pulled from the dumpster. Food and eating is just one of the things homeless people get miserable and grumble about. Albert, hanging with other homeless people daily, must have gotten tired of listening to it.