I Knew Jack
One blustery December day. long ago. I was at home removing a few business files from my snow-covered car. I was startled in the quiet of my driveway by a man’s familiar voice. “Hi, Jim. How are ya?” he said as he circled ‘round the tall holly tree near our front door. His chilled voice was cheerful but it brought no cheer at all to my early morning chore. It was Jack.
I met Jack several years ago when I was in the private practice of law in Wilmington, Delaware. He was burned out, I was told then. Fried on drugs, several had told me. His slow speech, unkempt appearance and fearful, child-like manner convinced me it was true. He worked through winters pulling the hoses on oil delivery trucks for various owners. But the advent of warm weather would find him spending nights at the Salvation Army Shelter and days prone on a park bench in Rodney Square, Wilmington’s business center. His mental condition seemed to worsen with each time I saw him there. If I saw him first, it was at a distance.
It was ten degrees outside when Jack greeted me through the frigid wind with his “hello”. My comfortable home, newly decorated for Christmas, was about twelve miles from downtown Wilmington’s Rodney Square, in the suburbs. I knew instinctively that he had walked the entire way. It chilled me further to realize that he had worn only his paper-thin spring jacket, sneakers, and blue jeans; he had no gloves and no hat to cover his thinning hair. I had never asked but Jack appeared to be near 50 years old and was not aging well, to say the least. His imposition annoyed me and under my breath I cursed the client friend who had introduced us several years ago, claiming that Jack could do some yard work for me at a reasonable price. I did him later to help me with some fall raking but only a few times. Nevertheless, I tried hard to return his cheer that morning, saying “Good to see you too, Jack”. Even in his frosted daze, his eyes told me that he knew better.
He began by telling me that he was just “in the neighborhood” and passed pleasantries about how my two children, Jason and Lauren, had probably grown quickly in the last few years. I was somewhat surprised that my immediate reaction was a need to distance Jack from me and my family. There would be no warm invitation inside, no hot coffee by the now- crackling woodstove and no strained efforts at Holiday cheer. It was 1988, remember, and the Season found the media stocking filled with sordid stories of the unpredictable ones; the homeless.
As Jack rubbed his hands together, each clutching the other for warmth, our eyes finally met again. I pointedly asked, “What do you really want, Jack?. He replied, “Just a few bucks, Jim. I’m cold and, between us two, I’m feelin’ real tired.”
Within fifteen or twenty minutes I had driven Jack back into Wilmington, thinking all the way about how bone chilling his walk in the opposite direction had been. To put an end to his hand rubbing, I had given him my own gloves with a guilt-driven, “Keep ‘em, Jack”. As I handed him the cash he wanted and “even more”, as they say in the commercials, I became aware of the wide range of my own feelings and actions; my protectiveness, my distancing in marked contrast with an ingrained urge to help my fellow man. The risk that Jack would be encouraged to return unannounced another day also lingered.
I left him at a doughnut shop downtown and, at the same time, bought a dozen cream-filled for my family, still settled in at home. Leaving the shop, I glanced back at Jack, seated at the counter now with both of his still-gloved hands wrapped around a steaming coffee cup, his sneakers’ toes down onto the messy, black and white tiled floor.
“Merry Christmas, Jim”, he shouted at me, raising one glove to a forced but enthusiastic wave. I wished him the same, knowing full well that for homeless Jack, it was not to be.