You see them on the street corners and in the parks of most cities in North America: the sad, angry, and broken people we call the homeless. We see them everyday, yet we don't, as we have trained ourselves to look through them in the hopes that if we pretend they are invisible they won't see us and ask us for anything. Why are we scared of their requests for spare change? If it's spare why should we resent handing out a quarter or two to someone who obviously needs it more than you and I can even understand?
Maybe we're scared of what they don't ask us for, but what we might have to admit to if we stop to dig our hands into our pockets or open our purses. If we stop, and turn to face them and look in their eyes we won't be able to deny their existence anymore. We are afraid of the demands they will make on our compassion, for how can we "see" them as individuals and not feel something? As long as they are part of the faceless, nameless and impersonal group known as the homeless, we can ignore them, or at least reduce them to a social problem to be tutted about over our morning newspaper and coffee. Most cities have a couple of square blocks for the hostels, soup kitchens, and drop in centres where somebody else does their best to not treat them like a problem, but as humans with a history who came from somewhere before their hope ran out.
It's not very often you'll find an author willing to write about these people, let alone able to do so without turning it into some sentimental Hallmark Card, movie of the week bullshit. Yet that's exactly what Richard Wagamese has accomplished with his forthcoming novel, Ragged Company, being published on August 12, 2008 by Random House Canada.
Wagamese has never made a secret of the fact that he fell victim to the Native Canadian curse of alcoholism, and in the acknowledgments for Ragged Company he gives thanks to the people in the hostels, shelters, drop-in centres, and missions he stayed in through his years on the street and those "who showed me the way up when all I could see was down." This book isn't his story, but it is a way of being that he knows very well, and one that each of us, if we are honest, can see in it something that we recognize. We all have something we are running away from that we don't want to think about ever again, and we all have our means of accomplishing that task.
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