An hour or so before boarding the Lake Shore Limited from NYC to Chi I was waiting outside Penn Station when a homeless man started talking too me.
This guy was very interesting in that he was not drunk or drugged but very coherent. He was a few years younger than me and grew up in the Lower East Site,. I asked how he became homeless and how he has survived living on the subway for 2 years. He didn’t have many teeth and as we walked someone came up and gave him a pair of socks, He instinctively sniffed them to make sure they were clean.
Not that I needed to be reminded but most of us are a lot closer to being like him than living like a Rockefeller.