Is there a "street uncle" on your city's streets?

There’s at least one “street uncle” on the downtown streets of Memphis.

I didn’t even know we had one

until “Bobbi,” the young woman who’d been discharged from the crisis stabilization unit a few days before, showed me who he was as in “No, not that one…..the one next to him…no, on the next row….the back row, the one in the green jacket with the cowboy hat and the cane!) “Grady” had helped her, she said, shown her where to go for free meals, stayed nearby in the encampment under the overpass to make sure nobody hurt her, and walked her to the Carpenter’s House where homeless people gathered to be transported to one of the churches participating in the Room in the Inn’s program. I’d tried to help her when she confided in me that she was pregnant and had three children back in California. Unfortunately, she wasn’t interested in going into an exceptional, free program that would have taken care of her, and her baby when he/she was born until Bobbi could get on her feet. The last time anybody saw her she was walking down the street with a known drug dealer/pimp.

“Frank,” young, red-faced and dazed from too much alcohol and the grand mal seizure he’d suffered the night before, didn’t stop with telling me how Grady had helped him. He introduced us, even though we didn’t need an introduction. I’d already talked to Grady. What I’d first thought was sunburn and the grime of the streets on his face and hands was actually scarring from a house fire that had left 4th degree burns all over his body. He was three years old when it happened. The fire had also damaged the part of his brain that would surely have enabled him to do more than scrawl a few illegible words after I asked him to write down where he'd been staying so I could try to help him. He’d applied for reinstatement of his disability check, he said, because they’d cut his check off when he was locked up in Arkansas and he’d been on the streets ever since. I didn't even ask him why he'd been locked up. “Wrong place, wrong time, wrong people” is the usual response.

“Grady,” (not his real name, of course) helped a lot of homeless people when the person he most needed to help was himself. His lawyer had told him repeatedly that he couldn’t get his SSI (Supplemental Security Income) check unless he went into a 30-day treatment program for alcoholism” and then joined Alcoholics Anonymous to stay sober. “I ain’t goin’ to no treatment program,” he’d insist when I tried to talk him into doing what his lawyer wanted him to do. Instead, he chug-a-lugged two pints of vodka one night in the dark, dank grassy area next to the Save-a-Lot. If one of the younger people he’d been trying to “help” hadn’t been with him, he would surely have died. It took a few weeks for him to change his mind about getting clean and sober but he did. Frankly, I’d been really angry at him for almost killing himself with alcohol, but the last time I saw him, we’d hugged like old friends.

So what’s the message in this? Answer: There’s a person under there, and he might well be a “Street Uncle.” They come in all shapes, sizes and colors. Maybe there’s one on the streets in your city.