A New Take on Homelessness

She was pushing a grocery cart full of cans and bottles and whatever else constituted the net sum of her worldly possessions, walking in the curb lane against traffic Friday afternoon at the northern end of the Laguna Beach commercial district. Past the galleries, past the motels, past the little shops

that thrive virtually every day of the year, the woman in the ratty blue sweat shirt made her lonely way. I watched her for a while as she stopped to pick a can out of a curbside trash barrel, then a piece of cloth from another. A woman on a mission, clearly these were her daily rounds.

The thought occurred that she might have an interesting perspective on the great fire that ravaged much of the hillsides around town just two days before. I wondered how someone whose entire possessions could be contained in a grocery cart and two add-on garbage bags would react to people in million-dollar homes who had lost everything in a flash.

Would she feel a kinship with them, now that they were stripped of material goods? Or would she secretly be pleased that they had been reduced to homeless status? Needless to say, street people often have a unique take on the world around them.

As it turned out, she either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me. I approached her and rattled off my premise, but she waved me off without saying a word. It was impossible to know if she even understood what I was asking.

When I last saw her, she had wheeled her cart off North Coast Highway and down Myrtle Street toward the ocean.

The thought of her, and the others like her throughout Laguna Beach, stuck with me throughout the afternoon in the village. On the brink of destruction Wednesday, the town was abuzz with normalcy Friday.

Such, I guess, is the natural life cycle of disasters for communities. The apocalypse comes, we’re stunned by the force of it, but then daily life returns to its natural rhythms for those unaffected with almost lightning speed.

For the woman in the blue sweat shirt, however, life may never resemble what most people consider normal. I would have loved to ask her if her life ever did have a semblance of hope, if she ever did see a future for herself. At what point did she metamorphose from a young girl or a young woman into the person she now was, pushing a cart along the highway?

Surely she knows she is surrounded by the Bohemian lifestyle and creature comforts that Laguna Beach provides. Would she want any part of that? Would she feel sympathy for those suddenly routed from their homes and, if so, why would that bother her anymore than her own plight? And, in point of fact, ma’am, where do you sleep every night?

It would be curious to know whether she’d be resentful of people who, after losing a home to fire, had to decide whether to telephone friends for a place to stay or make a hotel reservation. I wonder if she’d be at all resentful that their personal disaster is considered more newsworthy than hers.

I asked another “street person” about the suffering of the well-to-do. He wouldn’t identify himself other than to say, “I’m alive and I’m here,” but as he looked up into the charred hillside overlooking the village, he said he didn’t resent the wealthy.

“It’s sort of like a funeral for a non-existent friend,” he explained, when I asked him what he felt toward those who lost everything.

“Watching the flames, I realized that material objects were being consumed,” he said. He took no particular enjoyment from that but suggested that the victims might consider “searching their souls to find out if what they lost is of any intrinsic merit.”

“I’m not part of this society,” he said. “I quit. I do have love in my heart, but I don’t want to play the game. It has very little meaning to me. I don’t want to sound hateful, because I’m not. But I don’t revel in their misery.”

What a modern society we have. How does it happen that one of us loses a home and everything we own--and rightly mourn those losses--and yet a fellow traveler lives every day of his life with his possessions on his back?

Fairly soon, the natural order will be restored in Laguna Beach. The people who are supposed to have homes will rebuild or relocate. The people of the street will somehow live out their lives apart from the rest of us.

Normalcy. Yes, it was returning swiftly Friday in the heart of Laguna. Good sun, chatter in the shops, bucks in the cash registers.

But somewhere Friday night and the next day and the night after that, a forlorn woman in a blue sweat shirt will be pushing her grocery cart along the side of a road.

Pushing her cart against the traffic.

Against the tide of humanity.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.