I noticed her sitting on the ground and leaning against the wall of a building on 53rd street because a large police officer (or security guard) was talking to her. I thought he was going to shoo her away, as was the policy of the NYPD in previous administrations policy of the NYPD in previous administrations. Instead, he was just checking on her, trying to see if she was okay. She was an older woman, probably in her fifties, her hair gray and frazzled.
She said her name was “Karen”. I asked her if I could sit down next to her and she said it was fine. I saw her eying the bottles of Gatorade in my bag and I offered her one. It was the only thing she wanted from me–besides the conversation.
She’d been out on the street since January because of problems she’d had with the shelter system. I asked her brought her out into the streets and she said that she was an incest survivor and that she had been battling dark, nefarious forces–and lost.
Before I even asked she said, “No pictures!” but she offered a picture of her one friend, the stuffed Leprechaun she named “Lucky”. She had lost her cocker spaniel last year, she said, so she got Lucky as a consolation.
What would she want people to know about her, I asked? She answered, “You need to watch the shelters. People are being abused. People need to be housed.”