Kako (pronounced like spanglish chocolate cake: Cake-o)

Tonight I asked God to show me something, to speak to me in the way that he does, something that would pull at my heartstrings. That wish was most definitely granted.

I went to bible study tonight at USC, about an hour bus ride from home. It's always pretty interesting - I am starting to understand why Curtis would almost look forward to that time. I look forward to that time. Maybe I will go on rides around the city just to tour the busses. Forget the Kodak theatre.

The sermon was on Romans chapter 8. Our shepherd is a student at Master's Seminary up at Grace Community church - and he does very well relaying a solidly founded message. If you are familiar with the passage, then you know that it is about dying to sin and life in the spirit. It was most definitely heart wrenching to hear, and yet another reminder that grace is the only way to heaven - I will never get there of my own works. I need to be reminded of that so frequently!

Afterward I didn't much feel like hanging around for a ride home. This has been a very long week and it was time to get going. So at 9:30PM I walked out of the Fishbowl chapel on the USC campus and headed for the bus. It was at the exchange between the 204 and the 10 that I met Kako.

I was standing a ways from the bench and she was sitting – there’s kind of the unspoken rule that you stand far enough away from everyone that nobody could lunge at you. Not that it’s really that likely, but everyone does it. Everyone is something like 8 feet way from everyone else. A girl asked to borrow my phone, talked for a while and gave it back. The bus maybe took half an hour to arrive, so I asked to sit down.

I was reading Blue Like Jazz, and with the conversation already started, Kako read a quote off the back: “I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.” Kako was heading ‘home’ from a piano recital that she had been watching. We got to talking about music, about cello, and the about The Soloist.

I haven’t read it yet. I told her that my sister wanted me to because it is about cello and it is about homelessness – cello is very near to my heart, and homeless is worming its way in very quickly. She read it when she became homeless. She was reading it while she was on skid row – and in her words, it was so very very accurate. She saw the scenes leap off the pages and into her life. “I never thought it could be me; I never thought I would be the one on the street corner.”

She said that she would be homeless tonight, but that she had been through the program at New Image and through transitional housing and that tomorrow night she would have her place to stay. I can only pray that she wasn’t fibbing. They do that, not wanting to admit where they stand, even in admitting most of it. I pray to God she was telling the truth.

She got off at the same bus stop and left in the opposite direction and my heart was breaking. A woman of at least 60 years and maybe 5 feet tall with her little wire wheeley-basket walking down Melrose at 11:00 at night to sleep somewhere maybe under a bush and in the house in front of mine there are 16 beds that are empty more than half the nights of the year. And I couldn’t offer her one.

My heartstrings had been pulled. I wanted to scream and laugh and cry at the cruel reality of the moment all at once; I was joyful at the story that she told, horrified that she should have to tell it, and appalled at my own helplessness in the situation. You don’t think of the homeless as being so well mannered, soft spoken, and taken by classical music. I forget sometimes how human the homeless are sometimes, even in a line of work where I get to know them better everyday, some almost as old friends. Kako felt like an old friend. I want to adopt her as my grandmother, and MS as my grandfather.

I gave her a business card. If her story holds true, she wasn’t homeless for a full year, and she will never have any reason to call me. If not, then I will be overwhelmed with joy and sorrow at once when she calls – joy because I will know how the story ends, and that it ends with her in a house of her own, and sorrow that such a beautiful woman for whatever reason had to experience such a brutal reality.

Thank you Father for the sight to see and the ears to hear such beauty. I fear, though, that I have spoken with one of your angels and let her walk away without giving her a bed to sleep in. Forgive me.