The Pursuit of Happiness

There’s an old boy who lives in the woods behind the Walmart in Berryville. He’s got a big red dog; Frankie likes it when we bump into them when we go for our walks. The dogs sniff each other and I bum a smoke from the old boy while we shoot the breeze. If I’ve got one, I give Red a treat, then the four of us go where we go.

When I was a kid, the red dog’s owner would have been called a hobo. Ronald Reagan called them campers. When I went off to college, they were called winos, and Boone’s Farm sold for 79 cents a quart. A wino named Norm slept in the hallway of the apartment building where I lived at the time. Norm always said, “I was a good man in the war,” when he bummed change. He was referring to WWII.

Hobos, winos, and campers are now called homeless, a word that removes the moral judgment from the basic fact of the person’s circumstances. That’s good, and evidence we’re a more civil society than we once were, notwithstanding our present and demoralizing civic leadership.

Why the old boy behind Walmart is homeless doesn’t come up in conversation; we smoke and joke, talk dogs and then go our separate ways. During the spring and summer back in ’67, I lived in a 1954 Chrysler Imperial I’d bought for $80. I didn’t know I was poor or homeless; I was just waiting for school to start that fall and didn’t want to live at home anymore.

We have a tendency these days to define people by their circumstances, especially economic – rich, poor, lower class, upper class – rather than by the dignity and grace with which they manage those circumstances. There’s a miserable jerk in town who chains a sad-eyed dog in his backyard 24/7. He’s sure he’s the smartest man in the world and his wife hates his guts. She says the definition of marriage is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

I’d rather be a wino living in the woods with a happy red dog.