Thanks For The Memories

There is a French saying that nostalgia is like an old woman who throws out fine linens yet clings to rags.  As I get ready to retire two weeks from today, I find myself clinging to all sorts of memories from these last 11 years, working here at St. Anthony’s.  Like that old woman, I’m having trouble distinguishing between linen and rags.  Here are a couple of items that, for me anyway, are too fine to forget.

One cold winter day (or was it a cold summer day?), I was walking down the ramp into St. Anthony’s Dining Room.  I could hear that someone in the lobby was at the piano and playing that great gospel song “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”.  (Dr. Thomas Dorsey, the godfather of gospel music, wrote it after his wife died.  Mahalia Jackson sang it at Martin Luther King’s funeral.)  As I neared the lobby I could hear that there were also people singing the hymn.  Sure enough.  A small crowd had circled the piano and were swaying like a church choir.  I was curious to see who was leading them in song and was stunned to see that it was an old friend.  Dionne is a survivor.  Due to serious mental health issues, and resulting behaviors, she has been “86’d” from just about every social service agency on either side of the Bay.  On her good days Dionne might be your ideal, iconic grandmother.  On the bad ones she could be a terror!  On every day, regardless of the weather, she wore multiple coats and carried all her worldly belongings in two overstuffed black plastic garbage bags, shuffling along with great effort, weighted down by age, illness and increasing isolation.  But there she was in the lobby at St. Anthony’s, making music that must have made the angels weep.  And for just a moment I thought I caught a glimpse of that Kingdom of God that Jesus preached about, and of that Beloved Community that Doctor King dreamed about.

My first Christmas at St. Anthony’s was preceded by a week of the coldest weather in recorded San Francisco history.  There was snow on top of all the hills and driving rains each night that were like monsoons.  A couple notches lower on the thermometer and we would have had a disaster.  But if you were homeless, you already had one!  The weather was so bad that various agencies were opening up space during the days and nights to welcome those without shelter.  As I snuggled in my comfortable bed in North Beach each night and tried to get to sleep, I was haunted by the realization that thousands of my fellow San Franciscans were somehow enduring this – outside!!  One morning that week, just after the rains had stopped, I got off the bus at Market and Golden Gate and walked towards St. Anthony’s.  As I got to our corner I noticed three of our guests on the curb near the Dining Room entrance.  They were all Viet Nam War vets and had been homeless for years.  (Talk about survivors!)  As I got close to them I blurted out, “Oh guys, last night must have been awful!”  And one of them, without a moment’s hesitation, said, as though to calm me, “Nah, Fitz. It washed the piss smells off the sidewalk!”  Think about that for a moment.  Read between the lines.  If there were any 3 people in the whole city who might have had a right to be bitter and resentful that morning it was surely those guys.  And that wasn’t where their minds and hearts were at all.  They’d actually found something positive to celebrate!  Later that day, and on countless days since, it has occurred to me that those dear, wounded warriors were precisely the sort of folks Jesus of Nazareth must have been talking about when he began the Sermon on the Mount by saying, “Blessed are the Poor.”