Miracle on 43rd Street

 

 

On 43rd Street, along Fulton Sheen Place, a block from Grand Central and next to Market Café where office workers stand in clusters eating pizza, you’ll find the St. Agnes soup kitchen, where you can join the homeless and the hungry for a free meal a few times a week.

And when I walk down that crowded street, which is especially crowded when the United Nations is in session, I usually encounter a homeless man standing against the street light, watching the confluence of passersby and waiting for a handout.

Even though thousands of people rush by every afternoon, he becomes especially animated when he sees me coming and starts shouting, “YOU! YOU in the bowtie! Over here! C’mon over here, I wanna talk to YOU!”

Like a skittish suburbanite out of his element in midtown Manhattan, I do exactly what my cautious mother always advised me to do: I don’t make eye contact, I keep staring straight ahead and I quicken my pace.

Of course, all this hubbub draws even more attention to me because everyone on that bustling sidewalk, pauses to see just who the guy in the bowtie is. Pee-Wee Herman perhaps?

I admit I started wearing bowties to stand out in the crowd, so all things considered, I got my wish in a perverted sort of way. I got more than my wish, and now I wish I weren’t so conspicuous because this was NOT what I wanted.

Very quickly, this public performance became a daily occurrence, and in desperation, I considered alternate measures, like switching to a necktie, which meant I’d have to retire some 150 or so bowties and sell them on eBay at a considerable loss, or maybe I could simply cross over to the other side of the street to avoid the unwanted attention.

But I did neither. Instead, I bit my tongue and kept walking faster, which didn’t really help my cause.

“YOU in the bowtie! Over here! A man looks sharp in a bowtie! I wanna talk to you!”

Heck, I love New York, but obviously not as much as it loves me.

I couldn’t imagine what he wanted to talk about. The presidential debates? On maybe my gross annual income?

This went on for a few weeks, and every day the commotion got worse until it was apparent I was as obsessed with avoiding him as he was with getting my attention.

“BUDDY! You in the bowtie!”

And then one day, suddenly, mysteriously, marvelously, I got this overwhelming pang of guilt

 

–- call it grace — and I thought of that very troubling story about Francis of Assisi, the young bon vivant, the heir to the family fortune, the man with a dreadful fear of lepers.Outside his town, there was a lepers’ colony, and one morning when Francis was riding in the plains nearby, he came upon a leper with sores all over his body. He wanted to ride away, but something held him there. Despite his revulsion, he got off his horse, gave the leper all the money he had, kissed his hand and then embraced him.

OK, I confess. I wasn’t ready for a spiritual conversion of that magnitude. I wanted to start slowly. No lepers for at least six months.

But one Monday, as I wove in and out of the pedestrians on that hectic Manhattan street, I came upon the man and things changed.

“Bowtie!” he called out, and I walked up to him. He smiled and offered me a cigarette.

“Don’t you know those things will kill you?” I said.

I reached into my pocket and gave him five bucks

 

– I wasn’t ready to give him all my cash just yet.”Stay out of trouble,” I said.

Now, when I see him, I go out of my way to give him something. (Hey, at least he stopped yelling.) The entire ordeal reminded me I have a long way to go to get to where I should be. Of course, I have no intention of following in Francis’ footsteps. I don’t have the courage or the commitment. I’m a weak man who loves making money more than being generous.

But change is slow, and there’s no telling where it will lead us. Consider that crazy Francis. After he embraced the leper, he started visiting them in hospitals and then made a pilgrimage to Rome and left all his money at St. Peter’s tomb.

When he walked outside, beggars swarmed around him like a flock of pigeons competing for a few crumbs of bread. Since he had no money left, he took off his clothes and gave them to the poorest man there.

In exchange, he took the beggar’s rags to wear. And for the rest of the day, he stood in the square, his hand out, begging for coins because he wanted to understand the humiliation the poor endure.