One hell of a night at the homeless shelter!

I wrote this on Dec. 1, 2007, but didn't start my blog until the 12th. As such, I've a bit of catching up to do.

I went in to work at the shelter at 10:30 on Thursday night. My shift used to end at 6:30; but for the rest of the season, it'll be more like 8:00 a.m. as my boss managed to secure two days a week for the guests to take showers in the locker room of a no-longer-used local school. (Actually, the swimming pool still gets used, but classes are no longer held at the place.) I was prepared for a long shift, but not one as eventful as this one turned out to be!

First, we had a new guest at the shelter: a mentally ill woman who meandered about the place muttering incoherently to herself and wagging her index finger at nothing any of us could see. My boss advised me that the woman also was known to engage in "sexually inappropriate behavior" toward the men with whom she was in close quarters, so I needed to keep an eye on her. It turned out, I should've kept an even closer eye on her, but for a completely different reason. I'll get to that bit of news later.

I was able to feed last night's guests (17 in all) with my Thanksgiving leftovers: 12 pounds of turkey and five pounds of baked potatoes, along with a couple of Diet Pepsi 12-packs that I picked up on my way in. When I announced that I had brought food, a line formed at the kitchen window in a matter of nanoseconds. So there I was, along with two volunteers from the University of Connecticut, hustling our asses off to serve the guests in a timely manner, i.e. before the food got cold.

After everyone ate, the volunteers and I washed and dried the dishes and cleaned the kitchen floor and counters. It hadn't occurred to me that feeding the guests would be so much work! Still, most of them hadn't eaten in several hours (when the soup kitchen had closed) and were damned grateful for the meal. And I was glad that my leftover turkey and baked potatoes hadn't gone to waste. Still, I was feeling a bit tuckered out, and I had only been at work for an hour!

Not much else happened until about 3:30 a.m, when a man came to the door. He said he had just heard about the shelter and had nowhere else to go. Though we aren't supposed to let people in after 11:30, I couldn't bring myself to turn him away, especially since we had room left (albeit not a lot).

It turned out, the poor bastard was in a great deal of pain. He showed me the soles of his feet, which were beet red, rock-hard and grotesquely bloated. I asked if he wanted to go to the E/R. He said he'd go after he had gotten some sleep. I didn't give him a hard time about it , but when his moans of agony started waking up the other guests, I took it upon myself to call 911 (but asked that there please be no sirens, given the lateness of the hour).

When the EMTs appeared, the guest adamantly refused to go to the hospital, insisting that he just needed to stay off his feet for a while and get some sleep. As the EMTs couldn't force him to go to the E/R, they left. Eventually, the man fell asleep, but not before his pain drove him so far to distraction that he spilled both the the food and the soda that I had given him. When the morning came and it was time to deflate his air mattress, I found a huge, sticky puddle underneath it. Lucky, lucky me!

At 6:30 a.m, I turned the lights on and roused the guests who were still asleep. A half-hour later, it was off to the middle school to let them take their showers. As the school was a good three miles away, two of the guests who had vehicles offered rides to those who didn't. There was still some spillover, though, and I ended up taking five people in my own car.

The drive was awfully harrowing as my muffler hangs low and dragged along the asphalt the whole way. When I'm in the car alone, that doesn't happen, but with the extra thousand or so pounds of humanity that piled into the Deanmobile this morning, I was afraid of going over a bump or hitting a pothole and losing my exhaust system completely! Luckily, that didn't happen. But will it happen next week at shower time? I certainly can't afford to get my muffler and tailpipe replaced between now and then!

The showering session itself was uneventful, though I ended up getting home later than I expected as two of the guests had to get to the methadone clinic--which, of course, was nowhere near the school. So I drove them there--although, thankfully, with no further muffler hassles. Once I did get home, it didn't take me long to fall asleep!

When I woke up for the day (at 5:30 this afternoon), I had a voice mail from my boss. In my haste this morning, I had forgotten to check the bathrooms before I locked the shelter up for the day. A most unfortunate oversight as the mentally ill woman that I mentioned earlier had hidden in the ladies' room hoping that nobody would find her and make her leave as, like most of the guests, she had nowhere to go. Since the doors have deadbolts on them, I had inadvertently locked the poor woman in the building!

When I talked to my boss about it, he wasn't angry, especially after I filled him in on what my shift had been like. He simply reminded me that checking the bathrooms was an inherent part of the a.m. routine, and that I would need to keep a very close eye on that woman if she came to the shelter again. My boss has been doing this kind of work for years and fully understands that it's easy to become distracted when you're dealing with 17 different people--and therefore, 17 different personalities and sets of issues and needs.

You know what, though? Last night's problems notwithstanding, this is still turning out to be the best job I've ever had. Its rewards go way beyond the financial! After almost 42 years, I think I've finally found my calling. Will wonders never cease?