Cereal and cigarettes

So, Paul is settling in to life in the homeless shelter. Actually, he corrected me this morning, it's called a rescue mission.

The new routine for me and Paul, as far as I can tell, is this. Every other day, I give him a pack of cigarettes. Since the rescue mission kicks him out at 6am, he wakes up, gets his act together, gets on the bus and comes over here. My doorbell rings about 6:45, maybe 7 if I'm lucky.

I try to make him talk to me a little before he goes away again. I worry about him. So, when I asked him today what is going on with him, I got three interesting answers.

First, he told me that he's trying to line up some day-labor working construction or something. So he went to a place and applied. Me: "That sounds promising." Him: "Not really. I failed the psychological exam." He looked at me with a sort of sad smile and said "I always fail psychological exams." And then he sort of laughed. It was the sort of thing that, if you didn't know better, you would almost think he was throwing the exam, trying to fail. Strange.

Then he says: "But Jesus is really looking out for me now." I asked him how and/or why he believed that to be the case. He reminded me that he has to listen to an hour long sermon about Jesus everyday. He didn't really have much sense of what they are saying about Jesus, but Paul knows that Jesus cares about him.

And, finally, almost randomly, I asked him if they served him a hot breakfast in the morning. No breakfast. I guess maybe they think that you'll look harder for work if you take on the day hungry. Maybe they never heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I find it somewhat strange that they don't feed these guys.

So, I suspect that this is my new life for a while. Every other morning, Paul is going to stop by for cereal and cigarettes.