A Man Who is Cold

 It’s funny how and when you remember lines from books.

On Monday, I was in the kitchen of a homeless shelter where two of my friends and I were serving as volunteers.  It was a bitterly cold day.  As I drove toward the shelter in the dark the thermometer on the dial of the Buick read -2.  There was a bad wind. 

We had served breakfast to the people in the shelter and were washing dishes when a man pounded on the door.  We let him in.

He stood on the mat by the door with a pained look on his face.  He was wearing a parka, sweatpants, snow boots, and tattered gloves. 

“Can I just stay here for a while?  My hands are so cold.”

He had a beard and mustache.  Ice was frozen around his nose and mouth.  But it was his hands he was worried about.

“My hands are stiff as boards.”

He tried to pull off his gloves but grimaced in pain. A staff person from the shelter saw him and called out his name while walking towards him.  Let’s call the cold man Paul.

“Paul!  What are you doing here on a morning like this?”

He looked a little scared.

“I have to go to court.  I can’t miss it.”

He kept trying to pull off his gloves.

“Can I just run my hands under warm water in the sink?”

“Paul you’re not supposed to be in here. We got Covid restrictions.  You know that.  If you come back in here you have to have a test.”

Paul kept working at his gloves.

“Besides that, it’s President’s day Paul.  The courthouse is closed.”

“No, I got to talk to a man up there.  It’s important.”

The staff person had a series of questions for Paul to answer and asked them in rapid-fire.

“They didn’t kick you out did they Paul?”

“No, no. They’re being good to me.”

“What happened to your gloves?  We just gave you those gloves.”

“I had to dig around in some stuff was frozen. They got all tore up.”

“Well, I’m getting you another pair.  And I’m giving you some hand warmers.  You can put those in your boots too if your feet get cold.”

As the staff person left to find more gloves Paul turned to me.

“Do you have any sandwiches you could give me?  Maybe egg salad? Or some of them tuna salad ones?”

“Sure.”

I opened the fridge and scanned the door.  It was lined with sandwiches donated by a local grocery deli.  I found one of each.  The staff person was back with gloves and a bunch of hand warmers in slim packets.

“You know how these things work right?”

The staff person tore open the wrapper on a chemical hand warmer and started twisting it and slapping it on the counter. 

“OK.  Take those gloves off, put this in your palm, then put these new gloves on.  You can wear those old gloves over the new ones if you want.”

The staff person looked him over.

“You wearing the two pairs of pants I gave you?  You got another pair under those?”

“Yes.”

When Paul wasn’t engaged in answering the staff person’s questions, he was talking softly.  At first, I thought he was talking to himself, but the more I listened the more I realized it was half of a conversation he was having with someone else, complete with pauses in between. 

“OK, what about food?  You got the bag we gave you?”

Paul wore a backpack and carried a cloth grocery bag.  He had put the sandwiches I gave him in the bag.  He opened it for her. 

The staff person knew where everything was, going to the shelves then the fridge.  Paul was given pouches of juice, containers of yogurt and cottage cheese, more sandwiches.

“Where do they have you sleeping?”

The staff person obviously knew a lot about where Paul had gone after he left the shelter.  She was very concerned about his well-being.

“On the breezeway.” 

“ON THE BREEZEWAY? IS IT CLOSED UP?”

“Yeah. Closed up pretty good.  And they got me a heater.  Propane heater.”

“You got propane?”

“Yeah.  It works good.”

He resumed his other conversation, then stopped.

“Thanks for letting me in to warm up and for the food.  But I gotta go.”

“Paul, don’t you tell me you’re going to try to walk to the courthouse.”

“I have to.’

“Which courthouse?  Downtown?” I asked.

“No, the one up towards Wal Mart.”

“Paul,” the staff person said, “you can’t walk that far.  Besides, I’m telling you they’re not open.  It’s a holiday.”

The staff person called the county on a cell phone but got nothing but recordings.

“I’ll be in trouble if I don’t go.  Can you take me up there?”

“No.  I can’t leave.”

“I’ll take him up there,” I said.  “We’ll find out if it's open and if it’s not I’ll take him to where he’s staying.”

The staff person looked at me.  I think I may have been pushing the rules.

“You sure?”

“I live up that way.  If he is determined to go, there is no other safe way I can see.”

“OK thank you.”

“Paul, I want you to promise me when you get back to your place you’re going to stay there.  You can’t be walking around in this weather.  You understand me?”

Paul nodded at the shelter staff person.  He seemed anxious to leave.

It was treacherous getting to where the Buick was parked.  Snow filled in the footprints I made when I arrived three hours earlier.  There was ice under the snow. The temperature was in the single digits but the wind chill had to be way below zero.

As Paul slid into the passenger seat of the Buick, I handed him a face mask.

“Wear this please?”

“OK.”

As we headed toward the one way north, he began talking softly again.  I interrupted him.

“I think it’s the worst day of winter so far.”

Paul seemed startled, but he responded.

“It’s darn cold.  I know that.”

“When the wind blows this high it makes the cold a lot worse.  You can get frostbite.”

He didn’t reply.  I kept talking.

“Who are you seeing at the courthouse?”

“I don’t know but I know where I have to go.  I have a paper.”

I wanted to look at the paper, but I was driving. Besides, I was no longer a social worker.  I was just a guy giving another guy a ride.  Still, I couldn’t help asking him more questions.

“You mentioned a propane heater.  Is that like a camp stove?  Open flame?  Or does it have a cover over it?”

“It has a cover.  And a little pilot light.  I have to relight it.”

“You have to be careful with those heaters in a small closed-up space.  They can burn up all the oxygen.  If that happens you go to sleep and don’t wake up.  You know about that?”

“Yeah, I know all about that.  My friend says that breezeway is nothing to worry about.  He said there is still plenty of outside air coming in.”

‘I bet there is,’ I thought to myself. 

We pulled into the parking lot of the courthouse.  In it were two pickup trucks.  Men driving snow removal equipment were clearing the snow. 

“I don’t think it’s open Paul.”

“Let me go see.”

He went to the main door, pulled hard, then turned away.  I figured he was coming back to the Buick.  Wrong.  He turned and went to the next door some thirty feet away, pulled hard, and then looked around.  I was afraid he would go around the building to another entrance.  He came back to my car.

“It’s closed.”

“Looks like it.  How about I take you to where you’re staying?”

“Do you think you could drop me off at that Dollar Tree Store?”

“That’s probably not a good idea Paul.  What if I leave you there and when you get ready to go, nobody gives you a ride back?  You’d have to walk all the way downtown.  That’s a long way.  Besides, you promised the staff person at the shelter you weren’t going to walk around in this weather.  Said you were going to go home and stay there.”

Paul looked away and didn’t respond.

“So, I’m going to take you home.  Is that OK?”

“Yeah.  I guess that’s smart.”

Paul didn’t say much on the ride back down the hill.  He resumed his phantom conversation.  When asked he wouldn't tell me the address where he was staying but he did tell me where to turn.  I thought it would be closer to the shelter.  It was a long way off.

“So, do you get to go inside the house where you stay?”

“Yeah.  As long as they’re not sleeping.  When they sleep I have to stay on the breezeway.”

“You got a lot of blankets?”

“Yeah.  And a sleeping bag too.”

I tried to imagine how it would be, sleeping on a breezeway last night in the cold.

“OK, slow down.  You can let me off here.”

“I’ll take you to the house.  Which one is it?”

“It’s just over there.  This is good.”

I stopped the Buick.  He opened the door and gathered his bags from the back seat.

“You take of yourself, Paul.  And if you need help again, go back to the shelter.  They’re good people and they’ll help you.  But don’t go back today.  It’s too far to walk.  Stay home today, and any other day it's cold like this.”

“I will.”

He hesitated.

“You want this mask back?”

“No. You keep it.”

He started to close the door.

“Thank you,” he said.

After the door slammed, I watched him high step it through deep snow towards a run-down bungalow.

As I drove back, I counted the blocks between there and the shelter.  Paul was staying twelve blocks away.  That is a long way to walk in below zero windchill.

 

The quote I remembered was written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  It appeared in his first published work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.  It is the story of twenty-four hours in the life of a political prisoner held in a Soviet concentration camp in the early sixties.  The camp was located in Siberia.  If I remember right, Solzhenitsyn’s main character Sukov, a desperate freezing prisoner, bursts from the cold into a heated room and is confronted by a group of prison guards.  Solzhenitsyn, through Sukov, challenges his readers with this question. 

"How can you expect a man who's warm to understand a man who's cold?"

People all around us are trapped in circumstances we don’t understand.  Trapped in prisons if you will, shut out in the cold.  Prisons of mental illness, addiction, and poverty.  How do we, those of us who are warm, understand those among us who are freezing?  I don’t know, but I know we must. We simply must.