Helping at the Warming Room on a Friday Night Friday Round-Up

Tonight, at the warming room, a woman and her family changed into pajamas to sleep on cots in a church gymnasium and it was the most poignant thing I’ve witnessed, maybe ever. People sleep in their clothes in a warming room. Often, they don’t even take off their shoes. But this family had a bedtime routine which they held to, no matter that there were fifty other people in the same room. The pajamas were flannel.

The menu tonight was dirty rice and braised carrots. It was a nice-looking meal but the mother in me knew that folks would be hungry in an hour, so I lobbied for the extra lunches to be brought out from the kitchen or at least extra cookies, it being Valentine’s Day and all, but I was unsuccessful. I said to myself, you don’t get to show up every now and then and think you can tell people how to do things. Next time I will bring cupcakes, and nobody can tell me not to.

Of all the things I think of at the warming room, I think of people having no place to wash. There’s a bathroom with a sink but no shower. There are places to shower if you’re homeless in our town, but none of them are near, all require a long and intentional trip. I look at the mom in the flannel pajamas. When and where is she able to get her two beautiful girls a bath? There’s so much to their story, I could tell. It wasn’t that long ago that the two were squealing in bubbles and pouring water over each other’s heads while their mom sat on the toilet with a towel across her lap. Now they are here in this place but holding on.

A man spread out his mat under the far end of the table where we were dishing out dinner. He could have had a cot, but he chose that place to rest. He talked a lot, mostly to himself, but sometimes others, and always very irritated, seemingly on the edge of full anger, except that was just his tone. When he spoke harshly to another man, the other man offered a fist bump and the first guy said, “Not you. I didn’t mean you” which just goes to show that it’s always smart not to take things personally.

At lunch at a Thai eatery offering $7 pho, we chatted with the man at the next table about disconnectedness in the city. His was a bleak view, the essential point being that we had lost the element of other-regardedness in our culture. And while I agreed with him, I didn’t. Come to a warming room, I said, you’ll see the connections, one person to the other, the housed and unhoused, helper and helped. Who’s feeding who is the question I ask myself when I leave even though I know the answer.