At the Sunday morning breakfast cafe of the Hyde Park United Methodist Church in Tampa, a couple hundred people in various stages of homelessness line up for a huge breakfast and often to get help with certain problems. There are phone chargers (a problem when you are homeless), barbers, and folks to help with identity cards and food stamps. It’s fairly good-natured, with clients greeting and helping each other in ways that they can. Roger Copp, a great friend of mine, has been helping some of these folks with housing or food stamps for years. I chat with people about retirement while they wait to talk to him about food stamps.
My first interview victim has trouble focusing in general but the idea of retirement just stumped him altogether. When I used the word he got a faraway look in his eye and I got the sense that this idea had little meaning for him. He couldn’t really even answer questions about it, it was so foreign to him.
My next interviewee was an older, affable fellow named Nathaniel. Like many, he was happy to talk about his life. He makes about a thousand dollars a month from social security when he is settled enough for them to find him and when someone doesn’t steal his card and benefits. I asked him not about retirement, since I learned that in this room the word doesn’t have much value. I asked him if there will come a time when he was going to be able to kick back and take things easy. “Ain’t gunna happen.” was his instant reply.
For most of these folks, life was not going to get much easier. For one reason or another, they were going to be working the streets and the system the rest of their lives. I would find this completely depressing, but most had a kind of shrugging fatalism that enabled them to carry on. I’m not sure I could do it, and for that reason have a respect for people that don’t have many hopes for a better life, but who put one foot in front of the other every day anyway. It’s easy to be a person of faith when things are going well, but these economic refugees in this churchy breakfast club have an ordinary determination that judges my comfortable trajectory.
For a few, though, things might change. Roger says 90% are pretty much stuck in the situation they are in. He says he is most rewarded by working with the 10% who need just a little help to get their life back together and find reasonably stable bed and board. These are the folks who profit most from his help and who represent the redemption that the church folks gather in the sanctuary later to listen about.
