A month ago, I spent some time with my mother and sister on Cape Cod. I didn’t get to see them over Christmas, but business took me back East in January, so I grabbed a couple of days. My mother - well, you never know when the next visit will be the last. Both are shopaholics, and I was wandering through a mall humoring their addiction when I chanced to notice a Samsonite outlet store. Everything half off. I checked with my resident experts, who gave the thumbs up, and I walked off with a new suitcase. Which is good, because, as is usual when I pass through home sweet home, I had a lot more stuff to lug back than I originally lugged out.

It also left me wondering what to do with my old suitcase. The burgundy and blue soft-vinyl monstrosity from some discount department store in the early 1970s. The one suitcase I had when I went from Seattle, with my freshly-minted Ph.D. and $11 to my name, to my new job in Columbus, Ohio. That suitcase went to Australia, got barfed on by infant daughters in New Zealand, carried scientific papers and the odd set of underwear to Germany, to England, to Montreal. The eyeholes on the strap are worn through, the buckle pin is bent double, and the plastic corner reinforcers are shattered beyond repair. And it smells of used socks and the incontinence of toddlers. Its “use-by" date has long since expired. I didn’t want to give it to anybody, and it wouldn’t fit in the trash receptacles that the city of Berkeley, California thoughtfully provides for its residents - collection (on my street) every Tuesday morning. So I put the weary old thing by the front door and awaited a revelation.

It came in the form of Lois the landlady, owner of the dreaded geriatric cats and just returned from her world tour. Like most revelations, it was ridiculously simple. “Leave it out on the curb. Somebody will get it".

Somebody, indeed.

It’s an odd spectacle, here in the land of million-dollar postage-stamp properties, on the evening before trash pickups. People set out their rubbish and their recyclables, in separate containers, for the city to collect in the morning. The city rarely gets the recyclables. All through the night, the street people, the homeless wanderers, pass from house to house, rummaging through other people’s leavings and taking bottles, cans, anything of any possible value. Look out your window to investigate that rustling noise at two in the morning. It might be a raccoon in the garbage. It might be a woman in rags. Step out of the house at dawn on your way to work, to be greeted by the noise of cars and buses and shopping carts with huge plastic bags hanging over them full of the night’s gleanings.

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien… - Leviticus 23: 22 (NRSV).

Sometimes a street person will speak, perhaps in your direction but not really to you: “Spare change, spare change…" Sometimes a street person will scream at personal demons. But mostly, the street person is silent, a partner to the Old Testament agreement of staying out of sight and hearing in return for that shopping cart full of redeemables. This is intolerable, says the man from Maine … but when it comes to the point of actually doing something, he discovers to his shame that he has no clue what to do.

The other night, Louis, the choir director at the fancy church, was delaying the start of rehearsal because he was busy shaking out and bundling up some large raggy cloth he’d found in a back room. Then he dashed out of the hall. I followed – the music I needed for rehearsal was in another room in the direction he was going. The cloth’s destination was immediately apparent. He was big, white, heavily tattooed, and from all appearances had nothing but the clothes on his back. And he lacked the glassy unseeing stare of the veteran street person. He looked new to this, grateful for the small courtesy, looking like he might welcome communication. It wasn’t enough: as the choir members passed back and forth between the rehearsal room and the room where the music was kept, no one broke the cone of silence. No, nor I …

"I swear to you, whatever you didn’t do for the most inconspicuous members of my family, you didn’t do for me." - Matthew 25: 45 (Scholar’s Version).

Another man from Maine went to war because he thought something was intolerable. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. The Hero of Gettysburg’s Little Round Top. A man lionized for having the steel of a warrior on the battlefield and the heart of a woman in the hospital tent. Shot through both hips in 1864, he died of a wound universally considered fatal. In 1914. After four terms as governor of Maine and a decade as president of Bowdoin College. He was successor to the Bowdoin chair of Natural Religion held by Calvin Stowe, husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He taught every course on the curriculum, at one time or another, except one (mathematics). I guess the master of seven languages couldn't master trigonometry. He joined the Union army against his wife’s and family’s wishes because he hated slavery and secession, and thought it his duty to fight against them. Maine was a hotbed of anti-slavery activism in the years leading up to the Civil War. It was also, then as now, the whitest state in the nation. Most 19th century Mainers had never actually seen a black person, slave or free. Including Chamberlain.

That changed on the march to Gettysburg. It changed when Chamberlain’s regiment encountered a field hand, wounded by a rifle bullet. The man was black, barely articulate (possibly, newly arrived from Africa), and petrified. And Chamberlain didn’t know what to do. As Colonel and commanding officer, he could order a surgeon to look at him, and he did. But he could not relate to this heavily-melanized derangement of his assumptions. He could only offer this man the gleanings of medical care and a dismissal into the nebulous world of the street people, with no way of knowing what would become of him.

The battered burgundy-and-blue suitcase is still sitting by the front door. Trash pickup isn’t ‘til Tuesday. Time enough then to dismiss this bruised remnant of my travels into the nebulous world of the street people, with no way of discovering what will become of it. The zippers still work, it will hold things well enough. I hope that someone out there will be less cold and wet because of it.

And I hope that, down the road, it is not I who finds it again at the bottom of some dumpster.

  - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.