Saturday evening downtown 5-23-15

One of  His disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to Him, "There is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two small fish, but what are they among so many?"  --John 6:9

Yeah, I took a Saturday off to visit a family member and came back home via downtown.  I arrived there at around 6:30-7 pm and drove to the Jack in the Box to kind of 'freshen up' after the long drive. I hadn't 'reloaded' the car with clothes from the week before and didn't have any water with me, so this trip (stop would be more accurate) would be somewhat brief.  I ordered a combo meal and read for a while before getting started.  I went into the bathroom to wash up and met Kenny one of my homeless friends. He told me he had a bad day recycling.  It seemed that every place he went to where he usually scores a good amount of recyclables had already been picked through.  So now its the end of the day and he had little to show for it.  I told him so see me when he came out of the bathroom and I'd hook him up.  I had finished my combo meal and told Kenny he could have my soda cup and refill it with whatever he wanted.  I gave him a couple of burgers and he asked if he could look through the clothes in my car.  I told him there weren't a lot of men's clothes this time, but he was welcome to look through anyway.  While he was looking through the car, John Stokes came up.  Now I hadn't see John in a while.  There are a lot, maybe up to a dozen, people living where he lives and it depletes your food and water resources too quickly to stop there now.  In fact, in talking with him about this he told me someone else came by the other day where he lives and that's exactly what happened to them too.  My guess is it won't be long before the police run everyone off there.  I gave John some burgers and about two or three minutes later he came back with a woman about thirty years old who was obviously upset.  John said her boyfriend had just left her and she needed a phone to use so I let her use mine.  While this was happening another man walked up asking to look through the clothes. Apparently, he had gone through the clothes in my car a while back and got a new shirt of some sort that still had a tag on it. The tag said $80.00 and he told me he still had it. Once again I had to warn him that most of the clothes were women's but he didn't seem to mind.  He ended up with an arm load of clothes (and two burgers too).  I gave him a hug and he was on his way. Kenny was still there and was now eating his burgers.  The woman was still on the phone trying to get in touch with her uncle. I waited a while longer and Kenny and I continued to talk. I asked him about some of our mutual friends.  Will (or Willie) who lived across the street from where we had the BBQ back in August was now out of jail.  I'm not sure where he's staying now because the police had run everyone out of Channing St.  The other Willie I know Kenny said he saw him a couple of weeks ago.  I guess he's doing OK.

By now I started giving the woman using my phone signals that I needed to get going.  She finished up her calls after a couple of more minutes and thanked me for the use of the phone.  She said, "You don't know what a life-saver you've been".  I gave her a hug and told her everything would work out. I gave Kenny a hug too before leaving.  I had enough burgers left for two others and drove over to Washington and Long Beach Ave to look for Carlos from Nicaragua.  Didn't see him, so I drove down one of the alleys off Hooper St.  There was a man there from last week with two other men.  Last week he had on a cap that said "Hebrew" across the front of it.  I told him a joke about "Hebrew" (ask me how it goes the next time you see me--it's funny).  This Saturday he didn't have the cap on and I didn't recognize him as being the same guy from last week although he did look familiar. Anyway, he recognized me and commented about the joke from the week before.  Well, with three men there and only four burgers  I handed him the bag and said, "I'll leave it up to you as to how to give these out."  And with that, I left for home.  I was pretty tired by this point, I had been up at 4:30 am and driven over 400 miles.  But as brief as the trip through downtown was, I still brought the Kingdom to over a half a dozen people.  --Until next time.  John