One of my favorite memories of my time as vicar of Saint John's, Clearwater, SC was my
friendship with a homeless man named Thomas Weeks. We spent a great deal
of time together, and despite his particular neurosis, he was quite enjoyable. He would often meet me at the church first
thing in the morning having walked down from wherever he had stayed that night.
I would find him sitting in our memorial garden waiting for me. He would tell me that Saint Francis (a statue in the garden) and he had developed quite a good
relationship, and he enjoyed spending time with him. Thomas would hang around the church and perhaps do an odd job or two
until I was ready to go out to do some visiting. He would stay in the car while I visited, but seemed to enjoy simply riding with me.
Thomas would tell jokes and stories and was quite an
entertaining man. He would say that it was his job to get my
"dolphins" going (referring endorphins) by making me laugh. He considered me far too serious.
Thomas was in his early seventies when I met him. One couldn't talk to Thomas long before he would go into the story of his mother giving him up for adoption at age seven and the trauma of growing up in an Catholic orphanage. A spirit of rejection and abandonment had prevented him from functioning normally and consistently throughout his life. It kept Thomas homeless and alone.
Thomas would not give people a chance to abandon him by abandoning
them first. His all-to-familiar pattern was to buy a bus ticket, once he got his monthly check from DSS, and would take off. Thomas rode up
or down the eastern seaboard from Miami to Philadelphia, until he would run out
of money. I received many calls from emergency rooms telling me that
Thomas was there suffering from dehydration, low potassium, anemia, or the such.
Someone would usually buy him a bus ticket back to North Augusta. I
called him the last of the great hobos.
During the time I knew Thomas, North Augusta and Horse Creek Valley
were home for him, at least as close to a home as he had. I insisted
that he was getting too old to be on the road but expressing too much care and concern just
played into his neurosis. Nancy and I
invited Thomas to live with us, which he did for a while. From time to time his wanderlust would set
in, and he would be gone. He would always come back, until one day,
he didn't.
Thomas always sat in the same chair in our
den, the chair I now regularly use these days. He would watch TV for
hours and would habitually swing his feet as he watched TV. His cheap rubber-soled shoes left marks on the
carpet at the foot of that chair. Eventually,
Nancy was able to get the marks out of the carpet, but in a way, I hated to see
the marks go.
Thomas was staying with us during Christmas of 2008. We had our extended family with us for the holiday. They brought presents for Thomas just like they did for everyone else, and Thomas had his place at our Christmas dinner table between all the cousins. I suspected this was too much for Thomas, and sure enough, the next day, I looked out the front window and saw him catching a ride with a workman that had done some repairs on our house. The workman later told me gave him a ride to the bus station, which I had suspected was the case. That was the last I saw of Thomas, and sadly, I stopped getting calls from emergency rooms up and down the eastern seaboard. I loved that old hobo.
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