Caller ID

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." the Queen said to Alice. "I daresay you haven't had much practice."

I was sitting at a red light downtown this morning, watching one of the homeless in the shelter of a doorway. He was dressed in rags with mismatched shoes, a shopping cart by his side and a mangled umbrella propped up beside him. He was sorting through a plastic bag of aluminum cans and muttering to himself as he separated them. He stopped now and then to stroke his beard and glance around the intersection and when he saw me looking at him, he waved a can in my direction and gave me a snaggledtooth grin. It was warm but he was in several layers of clothes, including two hats and a glove on one hand. What looked like a hair dryer was tied to one wrist and kept getting tangled with the plastic bag. He was missing two fingers on his other hand which I noticed because when his phone rang, he saluted before carefully setting the bag down and commencing a search for the source of the sound. He had a brief and annoyed conversation before replacing the phone deep within the layers then returned to the aluminum cans.

Who calls the homeless, I found myself wondering as the light changed and traffic began to move. Better still, how many of the homeless carry cell phones? Like Alice, I haven't had enough practice believing impossible things but I'm betting that old man has. I could see him in the rear view mirror as I drove away, waving cans and grinning at passing drivers, happy in a world of his own making.

For some of us, the only difference between his world and ours, is a paycheck or two. It was something to think about.