I'm not sure exactly what the topic is here today. The things swimming in my head are the story of the 83 year old female burglar arrested in Hungary this week. She was charged with burglary since she had a long history of the crime, enough to be known as "the flying thief." She was called that because of her usual escape method using an airline flight. She rides the rails now to travel because it's free for pensioners in Hungary.
The other story on my mind is unpublished. A woman rang my doorbell this week and asked if we had a blanket we could give her. She was not aged but did have grey hair, maybe sixty or so.
She said she was being allowed to sleep in a church, and had a mattress but it was cold. I gave her a blanket but that's not all that went with her. Thoughts about the great depression, the attempts that my department and many others have made to reach out to the homeless in Los Angeles, all followed her back to her shelter.
Jails in LA are no place to take shelter. They are rough and crowded. But then so are the homeless shelters. Older adults tend to avoid the shelters because it's hard to defend yourself there. The older homeless tend to be more isolated because it's safer. they may be more entrenched in the lifestyle and have a harder time adjusting to living indoors. I have a note hanging in my office from an 80 something year old man thanking me because he had a room and a bed and he felt like I had a hand in getting him those things. I have kept the card long after the man lost his placement because the culture of violent crime he lived in took him back.
The word Hobo is having a resurgence. I hear my daughters and their friends use it. I wonder if we are having a return to the behaviors that went with the word- giving a sandwich to a man at the door, just because he asked, and I have.
I hope that the values of kindness, of paying forward, of helping first and asking questions later are not lost in the new age of need.