Ragman

Since it was published April 30, I have been carrying around in my wallet this story about the death of Reginald Wise, Jr. It was printed in Section B page 11 next to the weather map.

At My Brother’s House, John Waldron searched all the files and asked everybody,  but we have no information or knowledge of Reginald Wise to offer the Medical Examiner in their search for family. The city has a ‘potter’s field’ in Northeast Philadelphia and after a time, if no one comes forward to claim him a burial will be made there.

The story says he was 24 years of age at his death. Twenty four is hardly even grown-up; life still all ahead, dreams still all possible. I want to believe that there is someone out there that is looking for Reginald Wise to come home, somebody who misses him, a mother or father that  sent him off with love to find his dreams.

 Once I spoke to a young man, homeless here in center city, curled up for the warmth of the steam vent. He told me, “Sometimes when I’m laying here I think, ‘only six more feet to go.”  I don’t think that any winter night’s wind has ever blown through me as chill as that man’s despair and his unreachable loneliness.

I want to see in this some tragic error. I need some sign that this death is more important than Section B Page 11. That his passing is not as ephemeral as the today’s weather, that Reginald Wise is of more consequence to us than the weather map predictions. I want us to recoil in horror, to have a federal investigation, to ask ourselves a question: how is it that we have become indistinguishable from rags?

 Much of our, my, endless activity around homelessness has to do with housing and jobs, health care, programs, zoning and meetings and more meetings. This is all necessary work, and good work. Easy enough to get discouraged in it, herculean efforts for little payoff. I drive by the Reginald Wises, and though I’m sophisticated enough to avoid driving over rag piles, this is no great credit to me. The poor bus driver will have to carry around this death with him for the rest of his life. Does he live in a place in South Carolina where people know one another and are able to tell rags from people? Will he warn others going north, “Be careful, in Philadelphia, people are made to be like rags.” We should share some of the weight of the bus driver’s sorrow. Being so hardened by urban life that we know to avoid driving over trash piles, shouldn’t blind us to what we have come to accept as tolerable living conditions for our Reginald Wises.

This season of the year so much is green, warm and growing that it is sad to dwell on death.  Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet has a line, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower....” I don’t want to think we have reversed this force; human spring life crushed back into earth.
 

Joe Ferry.
First pub in Bethesda Newsletter