Everybody, Always

need find each other.
What this man really needed was a secure place to spend his days.
Someplace warm and dry. What I really needed was to feel like I was
being helpful. We both were doing something about it. I never got his
name and he didn’t get mine. I didn’t know what he did, and he didn’t
know I was a lawyer. I didn’t know why he was homeless or for how long,
and he didn’t know I hadn’t changed the oil. I just knew I looked forward
to seeing him at the end of each day and I think he liked seeing me. We
had found our rhythm together and didn’t need all the other details.
One day I came back to my truck after work, and from a block away I
could see my friend wasn’t sitting in the driver’s seat. That was strange. I
was kind of sad to see he wasn’t there and wondered what had happened
as I walked closer. When I got to the truck I found out why. My truck was
trashed. There were empty beer bottles, half-smoked cigarettes, and
garbage on the floor. A couple of knobs on the dashboard were gone. It
was a mess. I knew why he wasn’t there. He was ashamed.
Shame does that to us. It makes us leave safe places. It breaks the
rhythms we’ve established with each other. This guy and I had never
needed words. After he made a mistake that day, he no doubt thought
there would be many words he’d need to give me, but shame makes us
silent. It strips us of the few words we might have. It mutes our life and
our love. It’s the pickpocket of our confidence. I hadn’t done much for
him. We hadn’t had any real conversations in the many months we’d
known each other. I treated him with the same quiet respect he treated me
with. We just traded places once a day. Evidently, that day something had
gone terribly wrong and he didn’t know what to do, so he left and I never
saw him again.
We can’t allow this to happen between us. Shame will do this, and
fears will too. Dumb arguments will do it. Pride and its unreasonable
expectations will do it. Our failures and embarrassment will do it. Each
of these will tell us as many lies as we’ll listen to, then steal our words,
rob us of the rhythms we’ve established with people we’ve come to know,