On Wednesdays, it is my turn to supervise dinner and chapel at the mission. Chapel and dinner are usually a fairly uneventful hour. At 5:00, a preacher, Sunday school class or other speaker begins a message. The audience is usually a mixture of people, some came from the tejon street bridge a few blocks away, some come on the down town shuttle from the shelter and some drive in on their last drops of gas. Supervision consists of making sure that those who have already begun drinking do not get to disruptive, not usually a problem. At 5:15 the door is locked, because if our regulars were allowed to come in at 5:30, when dinner is served, they would hang around until then and skip the message altogether.
Tonight, at about 5:20, I saw a small family round the corner and come up to the door. They pulled the handle, then read the sign that said door locked at 5:15, then they turned and began to leave. There were four of them, the mother and father, no more then 25 or 26, and two small children, probably 3 and 1 years old. I made it out of the door just as they were about to round the corner of the building. They did not turn around as I opened the door, so I called to them. I asked if they were looking for some food. They turned with a murmur and made their way inside.
I watched them eat from across the room. They only got three plates for the four of them. One for each of the children and one for the mom. The dad did not eat. They sat quietly and stayed until almost every one else had left. The children had dirty faces and messy hair, and the parents looked as tired as the children. They left as quietly as they came and I again watched them into the parking lot. They went to two cars and began going through the trunks. They pulled clothes out, it looked like for the two kids. Then they put the children in car seats in the back of one car and drove away, the opposite way of the shelter.
I don’t know where they were going, or where they were from. Hopefully they were headed to work some where, traveling to a job or family who could help them. Maybe they lost their house and were on the way to cheaper living elsewhere. I have no idea, all I know is that so many people in this country are living on the edge of a razor. They are balanced on the edge of an existence others of us can not even imagine. They stare pain in the face every single day and have to daily decided weather or not to surrender or push back one more time.
That kind of existence will make people do desperate things. It will make a young father not eat, it will drive him to places he never thought he would be just in order to feel like a human again.
Maybe me letting them in to dinner helped widen the razor just a bit tonight, helped them keep balance just one more day and keep them from falling off. I hope so. Parents who still put their children in car seats still have some push left in them.