The Descent of Man
I think I can trace the years I've been in the neighborhood by what I was feeling about, or more accurately, how I was treating, the street people. I mean I can give a rough chronology of any given event because those events tied into the way I handled things, which changed over time. At first, if people hit me up for a couple of bucks, I gave it to them. That ended pretty quickly, largely because at the time we were the first house people would come to leaving the shelter and we would get hit up a lot. Then I paid people here and there to do odd jobs. My next door neighbors, when I moved in, were a genial but hard-luck group of three guys who held down low paying jobs or no job, and hung out on the corner. They kept an eye on the place for us, and called us once when the tarp blew off the roof in a rain storm. Another time I rolled up in the morning just after we'd gotten the house painted and one of the guys came up to me and asked "Do you have any enemies?" Fr...