Hobo

As the boys and I were going down the food line greeting the guys before breakfast in the "homeless park" this morning , we encountered several James, some Roberts, two Corneliuses, and a sprinkling of Williams. Then we came to Buck.

Buck's smile was big and toothless and genuine, and his handshake so real and so firm, that I stopped everything and made our Rob and James and some of the nearby men shake hands with him. They needed to feel the strength of that solid grip, the opposite of what Bob calls a banana handshake, where the hand goes squishy and limp on you.

I had to find out more about this grey-haired, brown-weathered Buck. Buck is Cajun and jabbered it like Chinese onto his cellphone. It turns out he has gone thorough great heartaches and trouble, lost his wife and son to an automobile accident and his parents to a house fire when he was a boy of nine years. As he told us this, James' eyes widened, and so I asked if he'd like to tell Buck about his birth parents.

He shook his head. Buck sized him up with a tender look, came over and put his arm around him and said, "I know about your parents. Life is sometimes like that, but we keep our eyes on the Lord, and we'll be all right."

Buck is from New Orleans and passing through. We got talking with him so long that, as usually happens, all the other folks had left the park. We were still sitting there discussing the Air Force verses the Marines, flying a plane, getting lost in a jungle in Central America (Buck has a global positioner for such an emergency), building in Brazil, helping folks after a tornado, writing books about a hobo camp, and dial-up verses high speed internet.

Buck is not your ordinary hobo, but he is living as one as he writes his second book. The first was Lover, Fighter, and H-lluva Freight Train Rider. The second will be entitled Country Gypsy.

You meet all kinds in the park on a Sunday morning.