Homeless friends thankful for small pleasures

On a hot morning, Pat and Kenneth try to cool off while sitting at a picnic table at Bicentennial Park.

“We’re friends. We’ve known each other about three months now. We’ve been on the streets for a while.”

“You would not believe how many homeless people are out here. We’ve got to kind of watch out for one another.”

“I’m sleeping in her car. Thank God we’ve got a vehicle.”

“Yeah, it’s paid for. But that’s about all I’ve got. When I started sleeping in it, it kind of freaked me out. You’ll do this 20-minute thing where you’ll sleep, then keep waking up because you think somebody is going to sneak up on you. A guy freaked me out the other night. He came to ask me for a cigarette. I was like, whoa, where did you come from? I was already lying down with the seat back, and all of a sudden he was in my face.

“We’ve just been trying to hustle to make a little money. We’ve been at McDonald’s just sitting there with a sign saying, homeless, please help. Some people do give us money, so we manage to get gas and food. That’s how we’ve been surviving.”

“We hold the sign, and we don’t even make eye contact. We try not to look at people. I’m ashamed. But we still sit out there and do it. You have to.

“Before I became homeless, I remember being judgmental of people. But now I get it. Now I’m living it.”

“Yeah, you never know what situation someone is in. You don’t know what they’ve been through. It makes you think, and then one day you find yourself out here.

“As long as you can take a shower or bath somewhere at least once a week, you feel kind of normal. When we can scrape together enough money, we get a motel room for a day. We get the room as soon as they’ll let us check in, which is right at 11 o’clock, and we keep it until 11 the next morning. We get a hot shower. We get a nice place to sleep. And it’s cool. Believe it or not, it makes you feel so much better. That one day of being in AC, being able to watch TV, not being harassed, and not having the mosquitoes trying to eat you alive, it makes all the difference in the world.”

“It’s hard to think about your future. You pray to God that life just has ebbs and flows. It might be a low now, but there’s got to be a high coming somewhere. At least, you hope so.”

— Kenneth and Pat

AUDIO EXTRA: Pat describes how she lost her job because of her age