Angel on the Corner

I'm at the corner of Roscoe and Balboa, in the borderworld adjacent the Van Nuys Airport. Is this Reseda, North Hills, Northridge, Lake Balboa? The last of these I've never heard used but found it on a "community" map of Los Angeles. Why I am here is another pointless exploration of Valley neighborhoods. In order to get here I had to wait almost an hour for the 236 at the Balboa Orange line stop. The people who were waiting with me had waited two hours. And on my way back from this borderworld I waited 45 minutes for the 240 at Roscoe and Reseda, a bus that should be at most a 20 minute wait.

But right now I'm at the corner of Roscoe and Balboa. There is one other guy waiting with me and we do the normal exchange about schedules and time, wondering when the next bus will arrive. Soon a third man approaches and begins looking through the garbage can for recyclables and maybe something resalable or edible as well. It's not a strange sight. As a bus rider--as a resident of the city, someone digging through the garbage is like a pigeon squashed on the road, I will look the other way for a moment, but after a while it just blurs into the concrete background.

The man waiting with me looked just as much the hardened urbanite, but he had some strange superpower that enabled him to maintain what Tibetan Buddhist's call "nying je", a critical sensitivity toward the suffering of others. He walks over to the man digging through the garbage, gives him a couple dollars and tells him to get something to eat. While seeing a man digging for aluminum cans didn't shock me, seeing this man walk up and a give a man a couple dollars who hadn't even asked was like seeing a dead pigeon pick itself up and fly away.

"You hate to see that." The man said to me. "People going through garbage looking for food."
"Yeah. It's crazy."
Soon we are talking about the politics of homelessness and what a sad country we live in where people live in billion dollar palaces right next to those who sleep on sidewalks.

What most impresses me is that this guy is probably not that far from living on the streets himself. He is just scraping by from one job to the next like most bus riders. He tells me about the band he plays in and gives me a sticker. I give him a dollar and say "take this for the sticker."
"What man? Naah, you dont have to pay for it!"
"Hey man, I feel guilty." I smile. "You're out their spreading the wealth, so I gotta spread it a little too!"
"Alright, thanks man." He smiles back.

His band is called Maintain, and they play R&B and Soul. The website on the sticker www.maintainmusic.com is no longer there, so I'm not sure if they still exist or if they have disappeared into the former band firmament, which would not be surprising since one of their band members is inhabited by an angel.