It was still dark the second time I woke this morning, and I remembered the screaming man. We’d walked to Portland State University to the Saturday Farmers Market. I was hoping to find organic rhubarb, which would go fast. We arrived just before it opened and walked all the way around, but only one booth had rhubarb and it wasn’t organic, so we went back to the south end to buy our favorite breakfast. Nathan smiled and asked, “Two?” because we always order the artichoke and cotilla cheese tamales with everything but the hottest sauce.
That’s why, only a few minutes after our arrival at the market, I was sitting on a bench at the south end, eating breakfast. Mature trees overhead, sun shining, and the homeless man screaming just a fifty feet away.
He was bearded and thin, his dark clothing of no particular color, skinny. Screaming. No one was near him, shoppers moved away. He didn’t know the time, he shouted. It wasn’t nine o’clock. How could he know the time?
I thought: the people we saw sleeping in doorways, the ones sleeping in their cars, the ones in camps. Those people need a safer place to sleep. But when their hair and beards are long, their clothing dark and ragged, and they are screaming in public, they need more than that. They need someone to take care of them.
The homeless man was upset about the time, and I understand that. The market opens at nine in the morning, fall through winter and into the spring. Yesterday, the day before Easter, it opened at eight-thirty. A small gong sounded to signify that the market had opened and farmers and merchants could begin selling radishes and honey, bread and hummus. The opening of the Saturday Farmers’ Market was the only way that man had of telling the time. No one had asked him, but the world was already strange, unfamiliar, and cold overnight.
If there were a million homeless people in the United States* a billion dollars a day would provide hotel rooms with hot water, three meals, mental health and medical care, and full-time staff people trusted to tell them the correct time and why the gong sounded early yesterday.
Most of that billion dollars a day would be left over. Imagine what good we might do.
* The most recent reliable statistic, from January of 2024, estimates about 770,000 human beings are homeless in the US. That’s 23 people for every 10,000 Americans. I convert statistics about people into students in one of my classes, or in my school, or in my school district where I once taught. More than sixteen people in my school district would be in the military. (The U.S. has the largest and best funded military in the world—larger and better-funded than the next ten nations combined.) Two people in each of my classes (5.9%) would have been hospitalized last year. One person in my school would be without a safe place to sleep last night. One in twenty of those homeless would be an American veteran.
Some homeless are the victim of economic disaster, some—maybe most—are mentally ill, some are addicted. Some have worn out any hope of help from family. Some get up with the sun and smile when I wish them good morning while I’m on my morning run.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 
I remember a TV show when I was a child called The Millionaire. A rich man gave away a million dollars to someone in each episode. Sometimes it changed their lives for the better; other times the moral lesson showed otherwise. The number “one million” became a lesson of its own in my 5th grade classroom: measuring the circumference of the world and determining how many of some object, end-to-end, it might take to encircle the globe, or reach the moon. All of that impressed me as a child, because it also put the numbers billion and trillion in perspective: numbers that were nearly unfathomable in terms of world populations, or distances outside of our planet, but not as numbers I (or any one I knew) one could attain in terms of dollars. So in the 60s and onward when the billion number was stated in terms of military budgets, it fueled my involvement in Anti-War and Anti-Vietnam protests. If I had known your statistic about housing the homeless back then, I would have used it in a report I gave in high school about Michael Harrington’s study (and book, The Other America) , about the poor in this country.
Now I hear the term billion all the time. There are Billionaires who essentially “own” and are trying to run this planet to ruin, afterwhich they will board some spaceship and go off to another planet to eventually ruin it instead. Oh, wait. Maybe that’s all science fiction? Maybe there are good people using their millions for good reasons. I’m reading Billionaire Melinda Gates’s book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World. Years ago I had the priviledge of meeting Wangari Maathai, the founder of the Green Belt Movement, and first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. What impresses me about her is how, after distributing millions of seedlings to women across her country to be planted and cared for, those women were able to change the climate, and use the shade of those trees to grow food and goods to support their families and communities. Maathai’s activism in Kenya, mobilizing many in a large, urban city to prevent the only large green park to be bulldozed for a high rise complex actually empowered the Nobel Committe to debate & argue that the definition of “Peace” needed to be stretched to include the Peace of mind and body that nature provides.
The numbers million and billion now stick in my brain with this recent factoid: “One million seconds passes in just over eleven days. A billion seconds takes thirty-three years.” That’s essentially a lifetime of years for some. Change takes time, and some of us may not see it in our own lifetimes. But we have to believe that change is possible. That’s as hopeful as I can be right now.
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The numbers are shifting significance, not only as I age but because of inflation and use. Your analogy is startling! “One million seconds passes in just over eleven days. A billion seconds takes thirty-three years.”
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And because I nearly always do the math: 1,000,000 (one million) seconds is 11.574 days; 1,000,000,000 (one billion) seconds is 31.709 years.
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Ha! I am not one to do math, but at some point after reading this comparison, I “worked the problem” to make sure I was not leading people on. I appreciate your allowing me a little slack, but moreso, I appreciate your *writing* and your exactitude.
~m
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Too kind!
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somehow I’m reminded about bill mauldins up front page 65 which says go ahead willie.if you don’t bust it ya’ll worry about it all night. i read this probably 60 easters ago-seems to have made an impression on me but I’m still wondering what that is –keep moving stay warm
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