Solstice Vigil
Not many here at Independence Hall this evening, a vigil for all
the people, homeless, who died on these streets of our city the past few
years. Other things press this Saturday night, being with kids, Christmas
preparations and all, hard to find time for this hour. Enough worries too,
why now for past sadnesses. It is dark enough, this longest night of the
year, without these memories.
Marissa Moyers has placards, on each the name of one of the people that
died. There are not enough people here that she can give out
one placard to each, she has to ask each of us to carry two, three
names, and a candle that the wind wants out. A handful.
My cards say Leo Posey, Howard Long, Martin Lesevic. I knew them, Leo
especially- I still have a horse he made for me out of plastic spoons
he fused together with fire from book matches. He was a Korean War vet
that never stopped fighting the war; emphysema had him down to nothing
but bones before life let go. Howard, a sad man, from South Philly, my
age, someone set afire the box in which he was sleeping, it will
be two years this coming spring. And Martin, disturbed, confused, Jewish,
blonde-haired, hardly any English, he was from Peru and I don't know what
brought him to Philadelphia. His body was found in the Schuylkill, ruled
suicide, no note. At My Brother's House we helped his parents in Lima to
receive his body home.
Forty-five or fifty, we say their names aloud and a little prayer. Too
small a crowd, too somber an occasion, for anyone to work up any heated
speech about the injustice of it all. Life comes as a struggle, for some
harder, bleaker, more lonely, but we all go. Not hard at all to sense that
on this cold night, but not clear to know what to say on it.
Danny Ruggiano. I see his name, hear it read. He lived just across the
street from here, the years I knew him. He would never tell me what his
name was. People called him 'Crazy Danny', no insult in this, but only
to distinguish him from another Danny that slept nearby. Near the
end he told me his real name wasn't Danny at all. People at the orphanage
called him Danny, but he found out when joining the Merchant Marine in
1942, from baptismal papers, that his real name was Donato. He was Donato
Ruggiano. Got hit by a car right here on Sixth Street, lay for three days
without attention, on the ledge of the Public Ledger Building until Cathy
Rose from Hall Mercer got him in the hospital. While there, doctors found
inoperable lung cancer. Danny told me he always had plenty of luck in his
life, always bad. He didn't die on the streets. The Hawthorne sisters at
the home on Hunting Park took him in for the six weeks left. He was buried
in a donated grave in Old Cathedral Cemetery near Second and Butler, below
a marker named Stephens. No one at the burial except officials; me, the
mortician and two grave diggers. No one there to cry, no one there to remember,
no one to mourn his loss. The mortician recited the 23rd psalm as if it
were one word, without pausing for breath, "ThelordismyshephardthereisnothingIshallwant'
He'd want to skip the lines altogether about goodness and kindness following
all the days of his life; not Danny's days.
These days, all of us looking for signs of hope; winter's solstice,
oil lamps that don't run out, angels giving off with good news, kings able
to follow a single point of light, I gather some peace for myself being
around this small circle, seeing someone holding his name, with a candle
and a prayer saying his name, not letting me forget.
Joe Ferry
Bethesda Project
December 21,1991
(First pub -Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan 2, 1992)
