By Judith Knotts
He stood off to the side, holding his plastic bag of food, watching other men from the halfway house waiting in line. Long and lean and looking different from the rest in a freshly-pressed tan shirt buttoned from top collar to hem, pink Polaroid sunglasses, and a gray well-tended ponytail, he caught my eye.
I walked over to him and said, “You look very handsome.” He smiled and said, “Will you marry me?” “I need to know your name first,” I replied. He said, “William is my first name.” “Fine name” I said and added, “Let me think about the proposal, OK?” William smiled another sweet smile. There we were on a hot June evening, two senior citizens gently reaching out to each other, exchanging pleasantries, and flirting in the most innocent way.
We both really understood the situation. He was an ex-convict, recently released from prison and I was handing out free food to men in the parking lot of a halfway house. When I mentioned his stylish shades, he mumbled something about needing them, so I never saw his eyes, the doorway to the soul, but the casual comment about needing the sunglasses and seeing his shirt buttoned tightly despite the heat made me wonder if he had some prison abuse or tat to hide.
William was looking for a job in a fast food restaurant and had been to Good Will Industries to see if there were any openings. Driving a folk-lift was his goal— there were no positions. Together we discussed how important it was to be willing to start at the bottom in a job search. William was not proud and said he would do most anything for a real job. I agreed with his thinking, yet anyone eavesdropping would be suspect just looking at us and hearing our conversation. To the outside world, we were two elderly and somewhat frail folks who probably could not haul trays of food all day or work a fork-lift endlessly.
William wanted to move out of the half-way house with its bedbugs and series of men coming and going. He needed work to be able to get a place of his own. And he declared, “I’m not going back to prison. I did a dumb thing once and learned my lesson.”
