Fledgling

Fledgling

“I don’t know if any of you will remember me. That’s not important. Let me take you back to a drizzly gray day on the street when fifty of us stood in a line-up waiting for that shuffle forward into the shelter for a bowl of soup. There was this one young man in the line who looked like he didn’t belong. He reminded me of the baby gull that had fallen from the roof top in the building beside the soup kitchen. Not much of a baby if I were to look at his size. His white gray feathers were all ruffled. His eyes looked sad. Don’t know if a gull can have sad eyes. And he looked tired. He’d been walking around the big apartment building that housed some fortunate folks. Squeaking out his baby gull cry over and over. His parents stayed at the edge of that apartment building the whole time, calling and grieving. It was like they knew it hadn’t been time for that young one to fly. That they had made a mistake by pushing him out of the nest. They called and called until the people on the top floors were angry and just wanted them to shut up. Those folks at the ground floor just wanted the baby gull to find his wings and fly away - or at least be quiet. 

Anyway, I was telling you about Steve. Yeah, that was his name. I’d just about forgotten. There he was in the soup kitchen lineup not knowing what to do. Kind of like that big baby gull. I often wonder where he got to. After showing him the dining hall, and sharing a meal with him he just seemed vanish.  I did show him where all the pamphlets were, but I could tell by the shame on his face that he didn’t want to be seen there. He had already told me the company he worked for was bankrupt. In the few words he did say at supper, he told me that he had just found a job that he was passionate about. He went kind of silent then. I wanted him to tell me more but he just put his spoon down and walked away. Now that I have this little room that I call home, I think about my own early days on the street. 

Did Steve ever find even a little room? Did he get back on his feet and find a passion to live life, not just give it up to the corporations. And all those men and women in the soup kitchen lines in their greying worn clothes, long hair and beards, in need of a shower, and a family? I know that some of them have gone on to their reward - and I do hope the reward is better than what they left behind. Some of them lived and died on the street. Some of them lived on the street and died in some hospital. Some of them returned to their families or found new ones. To look at’em you can never tell which is which. The soup kitchen lineups are just as long and sometimes longer. 

Well, I suppose it’s time for a cup of tea and get ready for bed. That still sounds strange to me - a bed and a cuppa when I spent years on cement with the cuppa filled with the soup kitchen tea. Good night to you all and thanks for listening to an old man’s ramble.”

“How shall I ever learn who I am when 

there is so much of me that belongs to someone else?”

~ Madeline Claire Franklin, The Poppet and the Lune