Park Street Angels

Author : Christina Nordstrom
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
ISBN 13 : 9781436378697
Total Pages : 108 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (786 download)

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Download or read book Park Street Angels written by Christina Nordstrom and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Park Street Angels a Chronicle of Hope On most weekday mornings, Bob Wright sits on a milk crate on the sidewalk outside Park Street Church in Boston. A fire in a Framingham rooming house in 1995 destroyed everything he had and left him homeless. Abandoned by his mother when he was born, his father was not able to care for him or his brother. Their youth was spent in and running away from orphanages and foster homes. Bob reconnected with his father later in his life when he was old enough to join him in his work constructing roofs of copper and slate. His father has since passed on and his brother's death (a result of suicide) he says was a "casualty" of the Vietnam War. Now in mid-life, Bob is dependent on insulin every day to control his diabetes, and he suffers from many of its complications, not the least of which is chronic pain in his feet. He learned some of the basics in navigating "the system" enough to access Medicaid and disability benefits. He used the Monday morning homeless clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital for his healthcare. When he first arrived in Boston, he tried staying at the shelters but found them to be more dangerous than the streets: "The inmates were belligerent or they'd steal from you." He looked for other options. Once he found several other souls in similar circumstances and joined them in their habitat under the Charles River's Longfellow Bridge. Once he sheltered in one of the bridge's "salt-and-pepper-shaker" towers. He and the others planted potato plants "all over Boston, all around the Big Dig." They used Charles River water to boil the potatoes as well as to bathe. Swearing never to go back to a shelter, in the winter he would sometimes burrow into a bank of snow to keep warm at night. Other times the MBTA police allowed him to stay in one of the subway stations. He says they didn't give him any trouble as he didn't give them any either: "It's all about my attitude; they let me be." Over the years he's made friends with, and has depended upon the generosity of, the regular morning commuters who cross at Park and Tremont Streets. He especially loves to see the children on their way to daycare. For the most part, spending mornings on the corner outside Park Street Church provided him with a routine, and he was grateful when people stopped by even if only to share some conversation. The one exception to this perhaps was the time when a police officer gave him a ticket for "aggressive solicitation." A judge would later learn in a letter, written on Bob's behalf by Jonathan Margolis (one of his Park Street friends, who was a lawyer and a great advocate) that the church had given him permission to sit there in the morning. Sometimes church staff would even bring him a plate of fried eggs and a steaming mug of hot tea. Interestingly, Bob relates that after the one [and only] time he solicited a handout when he first arrived in Boston, he received a verbal "thrashing" for not pulling his weight in the world; he swore he would never ask anyone for anything again. If anything, he should have received an award for "creative solicitation." True to his word and still never asking for a handout, this grey-pony-tailed "boomer" with engaging blue eyes had two signs sitting next to him on the sidewalk. One said, "Homeless by Fire," the other, "SMILE: It's the Law." On Fridays the sign is changed to "SMILE: It's Friday!" In the spring of 2006 Chris Nordstrom began a new job near Downtown Crossing in Boston. After being in the health and human services workforce for almost 35 years, she had become un-gainfully employed in 2003. A middle-ager in crisis, she pieced together some part-time and other consulting jobs while she looked for full-time work. A friend called this "patchwork time." Having lived paycheck-to-paycheck all her working life, and a lot of it as a single mother, the "ends" never quite "met." There was no personal rainy-day fund to tide