It was a blizzard. Nearly six inches were already on the ground and they predicted a foot more. It was freezing cold. The wind was hauling. It made the snow feel like hard frozen rain instead. I would have canceled our plans to go out for dinner, but my husband and I had agreed to celebrate my fiftieth birthday by going to one of our favorite restaurants.
Driving home, our car suddenly swerved to the left, throwing me against the window as my husband exclaimed, “Oh my god, did you see that?” I looked over my shoulder and was shocked to see the silhouette of a person pushing a stroller on the sidewalk. We were on a bridge that crossed over a busy highway. The sidewalk was invisible, due to the mountain of slush the snowplows had dumped on their first run. Who would be walking in such a dangerous place, while pushing a stroller?
“Stop the car!” I yelled, and my husband stepped on the brakes. The instant sound of loud beeping horns from cars passing us was deafening. “Pull over and open the trunk” I commanded, and jumped out of our warm, comfortable Honda Pilot, and ran into the dark miserable night, looking for the person to whom the silhouette belonged. I lost a shoe, and as I reached down to get it, a passing car sprayed salty water and ice on my face and soaked my fancy pants.
Ten yards ahead, a woman was pushing a stroller with a child in it. The little boy was just a baby, his hat pulled down, nearly covering his little face. Another boy was walking next to the stroller, holding onto the handle and trying to move his little legs through the snow. A heavy-set man was tagging behind them, plowing through the snow with bags of groceries hanging from his arms.
Having just stepped out of my warm and cozy vehicle after a lovely dinner, and encountering this family in the cold and wet snow, the only thing I could think to say was, “Please get in our car, we will drive you home. This is no weather to be walking with your kids on the street.” They protested, but the screeching sound of someone’s brakes startled us all, and we quickly lifted the baby out of the stroller, folded it, got everyone into the car and pulled away from the curb to get across the bridge—all warm and cozy.
I asked where she lived so we could put it into our navigation device. The young woman was too busy telling us how thankful she was. They had needed groceries and the storm had caught them off guard. She said her place was just another mile ahead, “Right off Route 1.” When she told us to turn right into a driveway, I was confused, and said, “But wait, this is a motel,” and she said: “Yes, it is right here, just drive around to the back of it.”
“Wait, this is a motel”, I repeated, and she said: “Yes, this is where we live.”
When we unloaded the stroller and brought the family to the door of the motel room, she explained that she had lost her apartment in Fall River and was moved to this motel by the state. She received food stamps, but with two hungry boys she often ran out of them before receiving new ones. They were out tonight because she had just received her new stamps and needed to feed the boys. I took the stroller out of the car and quietly asked my husband how much cash he had. He gave me all he had in his wallet, which was $100—five twenty-dollar bills. When I handed over the stroller, I opened the woman’s hand and put the bills in it. She hugged me, and said I was her angel.
She seemed so polite, and so well put together. Her thick dark hair was shoulder length, combed back neatly with a pretty hairpin holding it. She had a beautiful face: her lips were full and a deep red color, her dark skin without any wrinkles. I thought she must be about thirty—around the same age I was when I had my brain bleed. I could not help but wonder what terrible thing had happened to her, that she was homeless and stranded with two little toddlers.
It was a quiet ride back to our own home.
This was not the sort of thing I needed to worry about at the start of my fifty-first year of life. But the seed was already planted, and so the next day, I drove back to the motel with my daughter and knocked on the door, and that is how I came to know Tracy.
She is listed as “Tracy from downtown” in my phone. I don’t know her last name. I took her to Wall-Mart with my daughter and bought a lot of groceries. I gave her my number. As we shopped, I noticed how all the food she bought was unhealthy. I found myself thinking that perhaps I could help her understand more about nutrition and therefore make better choices for her two toddlers. Her two little boys were adorable; they had just turned one and three. The man, who was with her, she told me, was the father of the boys. While he seemed like a total sweetheart, it just didn’t add up, the way he was acting more like a guest then a dad.
A week later, Tracy texted me that the state was going to move her again, but she did not know where. “It could be the Cape, or to Springfield,” she told me. She seemed upset. I called the state office to find out why Tracy would be moved when she had a job in Boston and was trying to get her feet on the ground. I was upset, too, and thought I could help fix this.
I learned a great deal about our system in the next couple hours, and was actually very impressed with the answers from the different offices. They clearly work hard to keep welfare mothers with children off the streets. A patient woman on the other end of the phone explained to me that motels are a cheap way to give those mothers temporary housing. “She might need to be moved for different reasons,” the woman said. “Sometimes it is for security reasons, if the mother has been in an abusive situation. Other times it is because the motel is no longer willing to offer the housing. And once in a while, it is because the welfare mom breaks the rules and accepts too many goods from people in the community, which is not allowed, because it would give her free food stamps when she does not need them in the true sense.”
“God forbid a welfare mother would have a good day when she and her family were getting some extra treats,” I exclaimed. The woman agreed, and said, “Believe me, we get a lot of calls from very nice people like you who want to do good and in fact are not helping at all.” I found out that Tracy was not really allowed to get all these groceries from me because that showed that she did not need the welfare money. She had to make due in order to qualify.
It struck me that there was no incentive to get out of the system. Tracy did not have a degree, she did not have her license, and had been on food stamps since she was eighteen years old, she told me. I had been told by the state office that Tracy could qualify for education: she could get a degree while the state would take care of her children and provide her with housing.
That week, Tracy and her children were moved to their new temporary apartment, a group house near Roxbury, with other mothers like her. Tracy was relieved that she could stay in Boston, and that the man who she said was the father of her children could come and visit there. He was not allowed to live with them because they were not married, and this house was only for mothers. That meant he was now officially homeless. The state only helped Tracy because she has children. Her companion had no place to go. I learned that there is a constant shortage of beds for homeless men in Boston.
I contemplated whether this family could live with us, here in the suburbs of Boston. After all, our children were all in college and their rooms empty the majority of the time. But we have no public transportation nearby and Tracy would not be able to get to work. I talked to the local bakery and supermarket to see if they had jobs. I was ready to jump in with both feet—until, for the first time in my life, I paused before I set out to fix things, and realized that this story could be seen from two perspectives, and that Tracy’s perspective might look very different from mine. One the one hand, she was healthy and perfectly capable of getting a job this if she really wanted one, but on the other, she was very settled in some ways, and seemed to have accepted this lifestyle as her fate. She did not have an incentive for herself, and was not inspired to make her life better. The way she lived now seemed good enough. She was cheerful and happy with small gestures of kindness. In some ways, it was refreshing to see her gratitude for my interest and my care. In other ways, it made me sad, and eager to make her see that she could have so much more.
Two weeks passed and three more feet of snow fell in the Boston area. The whole state was shut down. People were calling it unprecedented. When I sent a text to Tracy to make sure she was ok, she texted me back that she was, but that she was worried about the father of her kids. He was sleeping inside the Prudential Center, hoping he would not get kicked out. I asked her why the Prudential Center and not a shelter, and I wonder if he had been sleeping on the streets since she and I had last talked.
“Tomorrow is the first day of his new job,” she texted. “He does not want to risk being late. He will be working for a company that counts inventory for retail stores. Their offices are inside the Prudential and he has to be there at 7:00 a.m.”
I looked at my husband, who was reading a book next to me in bed. “Do you still have those hotel points?” I asked. He had been consulting for a company in Springfield, nearly two hours from home and often the late meetings dictated that he stay in a hotel in Springfield. The only perk, we told ourselves, was that the Sheraton he stayed at gave points, which we had been saving to go somewhere special together. But with the entire state buried under 110 inches of snow, and even the metro system shut down on most tracks, I asked my husband if we could use the points to give the father of the two boys a couple nights in a hotel so he could get through this horrible snow storm and start his new job having slept and showered. My husband looked at me, sighed, and said, “Of course we can.”
I promptly called several hotels in Boston, only to learn that on nights like that, when there is a state of emergency, the hotels are full with medical personnel who have to stay close to work and can’t travel home.
At nearly 11:00p.m., I called the Sheraton back and asked for a manager. I told him the story and explained that while our points would cover three nights, I would also warrant the stay with my credit card, and he finally caved in and found a room. Tracy was so grateful. When she called me the next day to thank me again, I told her she should try to go back to school and make a better life for herself. I reminded her that the state was going to help her with both childcare and the cost of school.
I felt like I won the lottery when I received a text from her a month later that she was enrolled in a ten-month program to become a phlebotomist. She was also waiting for her own apartment with two bedrooms, and would be moving there when her program was done. She was working, too: a part-time job in a retail store in Boston. I could picture her there, this pretty girl selling clothing to people who needed the reassurance before buying a certain item. For the next several months, “Tracy from downtown” sent me messages that seemed like she looked up to me and it made me feel good.
On December 2, 2015, almost one year from the date we met, Tracy texted me that she was moving into her new apartment and that her boys were turning two and four that week. She had just gotten a permanent full-time job at a department store in Boston. When I asked her how long the state would provide services, she said, “Since I’m in a shelter they pay, and budget my rent. For now the rent is $71 dollars. And state pays for daycare. They will do it forever.” She added “I could grow old in there, but I won’t. It goes by your income.” She wrote that she could not wait to decorate the apartment with holiday decorations, and she was hoping to get a puppy! I immediately called her and told her that she was not allowed to get a puppy; that she needed to keep both feet on the ground. The last thing she needed was another being in her life that needed food and care. She laughed, but seemed to understand that I was serious and trying to help her.
I texted Tracy to let me know whether she was in need of furniture. She immediately responded and said she would love anything I could find. She was renting most things, and needed to find a kitchen table, and chairs, a couch, a mirror, and a dresser. This request was so easy for me to fulfill that it was almost embarrassing. To think that I sent one group text message and had all those items within ten minutes! The families in the town where I lived had so much, and were happy to part with those items. The only issue was the logistical part. I arranged to pick up all the items that Saturday with help of my husband. We filled up the Honda Pilot and drove to the new apartment.
When my husband turned onto the street in South Boston, I took a deep breath. The street had brick apartment buildings, one after the next, each five floors high. The windows were plain glass. There were no flower boxes or any sign of community-owned property anywhere in the vicinity. The streets were lined with cars; many had entire parts broken off. Some simply had been covered in plastic to prevent rain or snow from coming in through the broken windows. There was no grass and I did not see a single tree on the entire street. In front of several buildings, people gathered, but were bent over as if they were hiding something. Their heads were covered with the hoods from sweatshirts, and I could not figure out if they were just cold, or trying to hide their faces. Others were lighting up cigarettes. The smell of drugs was strong. I did not see a single child outside, or a smile on anyone’s face. Nobody said a word when they passed us.
It took a little less than an hour to unload all the items to her third floor apartment. The car would beep every time we locked it behind us, calling attention to us. We felt increasingly uncomfortable, as people stared at us while we unloaded, but, it did not feel like a valid option to just leave the car unlocked in this neighborhood, like we would in ours.
In contrast to the awkwardness we felt outside, every time we stepped into the apartment with another load of goods, Tracy was so happy, greeting us with her little toddler clinging to her leg. She could not contain her excitement when she saw the couch we brought, and immediately lay on it with her two-year-old. He just wanted to show us his toys in the little bedroom that he shared with his big brother. The kitchen still had three empty bowls and a box of cereal from breakfast that morning sitting on the rented table; a bra was hanging on a doorknob to dry. The apartment looked clean, and Tracy seemed happy. For all intents and purposes, for Tracy, this was as good as it could get.
We gave Tracy and her boy hugs and promised to be in touch. She called us angels again. Our drive home was quiet. I realized: it’s all about perspective.
Your story hit home because of the geographical location. You not only made a profound difference in Tracy's life, but provided the wind beneath her wings to aspire to more than subsistence. It's a slow climb to better oneself. And, as you pointed out, it's all about perspective to see a cup half-full or half-empty.
A very compassionate story. And it's a story that is growing because so many hard-working people are being forced into poverty by low wages. There are also peer pressures and other factors pushing poor people to rely on unhealthful food and spending their money for very expensive things that they really don't need like athletic shoes, cell phones, and cars beyond their meager budgets.
It is obvious that, while states are helpful as a safety net for those who cannot fend for themselves, in the case of Tracy and so many others, the rules don't allow for any enhancements like you described and people often fall through the cracks in the system like Tracy's male companion.
I worked in a university in a very poor neighborhood for 30 years and for 10 of those years managed properties that the university owned and rented to poor people. Even though the living conditions in some of these rundown houses were deplorable. Even worse was having to evict people that couldn't even pay the minimal rent or had to leave because of pending development.
I befriended a woman who has had a very hard life including prison time. She has returned my assistance for her by filling in as my caregiver on trips and during emergencies at home. It would be great if we could help everyone in such situations, but in the end, they have to learn to help themselves.
Black white (well sort of pinkish) etcetera, Christian Muslim etcetera, Hetero-Homo-Metro Sexual, Physical, Mental, Ow! Includes all human rights violations I could think of.
