Oak Park the beautiful in 2005 -- squirrels and sleepers, panhandlers, encounter in Osco lot . . .
as in Short History of Oak Park (IL) . . .
Communing with small creatures . . . I don’t feed the squirrels at Scoville Park, but I look at them and they look at me. I sit in the early morning with my coffee covered, lest they sip. My toast too, which is far more attractive to them. They hop onto my bench or timbered seat, probe a little, hop back down. I rise and stand before them; they approach indirectly, veering slightly, then probing to one side. One primps, scratching, nosing himself, his brown fur glistening in the sun. He’s light, almost blond in places, and holds his left forepaw or both forepaws bent at his breast. Why?
Big ones too . . . Weekday midmorning of a mild spring day, it’s time to wake the Scoville Park sleepers. Officer strides across the greensward from Lake Street, rouses one on the grass, another on a bench, they rise and leave. It’s apparently the drill.
A toddler had wanted to check out the one on the grass, but had been called back. He just wanted a look at this dark-clothed clump on the village green.
Knights of the road . . . There’s something about a panhandler. He or she comes up, as if to engage you. Timing is everything. “How are you today, Sir?” Or “Sir, can I ask you something?” But before he says it, you know him. He has a ready look, all personality: the con begins.
Sometimes the gentilesse gives way, as with the fellow appearing out of the shadows on a pleasant spring night from the brick pedestrian alley on Lake Street just east of Pier One. He addresses a passing couple, gets nowhere. He spots a man walking by and asks if he can ask a question.
The passerby plows ahead, ignoring him. “Can I ask you a question?” he says again, louder, as the man pulls away. Then louder, he makes his recommendation, with conviction: “Fuck you, mother-fucker!”
One who made his case . . . A man sits waiting in his car in the Osco lot west of Harlem across from the end-of Green Line station, about dinner time. He waits while the lady of the house buys greeting cards. Scruffy young man wants money “for a sandwich,” asking around, pleading. He’s in dirty shirt and pants, in his early 20s, not shaven but not long-bearded, nor is his hair long and matted. He smells not of booze but of no-bath experience.
You can buy the sandwich for him, he says, heading off the assumption that he will use the money for drugs or booze. Getting nowhere, he heads for Dunkin’ Donuts a few steps away, is turned out by its proprietor triumphantly: he got rid of the panhandler.
The young man returns to the parking lot. He pleads some more, moving around the lot. Man waiting for wife resists as before but finds himself vulnerable. The beggar is like people the man knows well and is less easily ignored.
The man leaves his car, enters Osco, finds wife still looking for greeting cards. He is deputed to buy one, does so, is told it does not pass muster. Distracted, he says buy it anyway, giving it to wife, who continues her search for the perfect card.
Mind made up, he leaves the store, re-enters the lot, strides toward the pitiful young man, not even looking at him, and slips two dollar bills into his hand. “Thank you, sir,” the young man says. Each turns and walks away.