Leo is a pseudonym for one of the regulars who comes for dinner. I had the chance to engage him in conversation this week. It's taken years to get to this point; Leo's coping mechanisms include affecting various accents and a jabber/patter when he greets and interacts with people. Eventually I was told by another homeless person that the way to engage Leo in conversation was to ask about his mother. It seems that Leo's mother has been unable to fend for herself resulting in the two of them being homeless since Leo was in his teens. Leo will not say anything bad about his mother, but I've gotten the impression that she's an addict of some sort. Even though Leo was forced to abandon his mother to get away from what Leo has described as "controlling" behavior, her welfare is paramount in his thoughts while he usually has no idea of where she is exactly. He believes that it's his responsibility to find a way to get housing for himself and his mother. He has foregone the normal route of looking for menial work and he claims to be pursuing his creative bent in art and dance hoping to achieve success there. For a while now, his mother has been 'living in another city and being taken care of'' which I interpret to be committed to institutionalized care if not incarceration. Now that he doesn't have to be able to afford a place that can house both him and his mother, I've been suggesting that he can consider lowering the bar and maybe also pursuing getting a regular job.
I have some evidence of what Leo might be like under other circumstances;he's seen me in the library and headed off to the grocery store to purchase dried beans and rice to donate towards dinners on Tuesday nights. He can be quite thoughtful in his responses. In our last conversation I mentioned that it was difficult to gauge whether we were making a difference doing what we were doing. He pointed out a number of thing he would have never experienced if he hadn't come to dinner. He understands that we want to provide healthy options for meals and his take was that even if less people take advantage of that, it was a good thing to be providing that option. It caught me off guard when he suggested that the devil had sent someone to try and kill me because I was doing a good thing and I hadn't let that keep me from continuing to do this and that meant something too.
