Coby? Koby? Colby? ...

Coby was still drunk when we met him. We may have woken him up as we stood by the car talking about lunch and passing off the responsibility to make decisions and plans. He had spent the night in a doorway not far from our church, passed out. He was strangely pleasant, though a bit bewildered by the fact that someone had stolen his shoes. I understood then that he had not been homeless in Portland for long.

We have so many homeless people and the competition between them only increases in the dry (drier) summers when the more transient population comes in and passes through. It is worse here than in a lot of cities I think. More than that, in the two years I have been here, the corners and bridges seem to be filling up steadily with an increasing population. Portland is simultaneously an easy city to be homeless in and a difficult one.

It is true more often than not what they teach you if you volunteer with homeless people for long, "everyone is from somewhere else." And everyone almost always is. It is part of the process. And so I have a habit of asking where they are from. He said Seattle. In fact, this was his first night in Portland. And someone stole his shoes. He said he had never walked outside without shoes before and that it hurt. (I didn't know what to do with that...but I hate wearing shoes. It is a luxury I have though to take my shoes off and know that they will still be in my closet when I decide I need them.) We found him some water in the church and asked around for some shoes. No luck. Nobody was even the right size.

Eventually we decided to drive Kolby to the Rescue Mission to look for shoes and to get him connected. Hopefully, to get him into a recovery program...but he would have to want it. And I am not sure he did. If my hasty judgments were correct, he was chronically homeless and chronically in and out of prison with a host of prison tattoos to show. I wonder how it all started. And I wonder if he even knows how it started. But that is not the point.

Colby wasn't shy or reserved like so many people tend to be. There was no way Betty would have ever gotten in my car, especially since there were so many of us when I met her. And it's not just her, there is a common thread of mistrust among people who are reduced to hourly survival. Admittedly, Koby was less than sober, but still. It surprised me.

So I wonder. I wonder why he let us take him anywhere. And I wonder if he really wanted help or if he just wanted us to feel good so he could go live his own form of life. I wonder if he was puzzled by us or if he had met us church people before and knew exactly what he had to do to make us feel like we may had made a difference so we could continue on to home and lunch and all of the constructs of a life that either he has no appreciation for or which had no appreciation for him at some pivotal point. School. Work. Bills. Family. Friends. Dinner. Get stuff. Get rid of stuff.

I cannot help but wonder if all of my intentions were misread for naivety, which would be true in part. (I have more curiosity and enthusiasm than I do experience.) Or if there was no reading into things at all and he just took things as they came. I want so badly to know, though, how it all looked through his blurry eyes.