Blustery, gray day. I wonder what John Chase, the most visible homeless person in Kailua, is doing today. Not wrapping gifts or baking, I'm sure. Does he know, by the decorations and tinsel and the line at the post office that Christmas is almost upon us? Does he care?

It must be decades since he has cut his hair. When we first came here and I saw him on the street, a brawny, ragged, dust-colored character inching along the sidewalks over by the shut up movie house, I didn't realize that the thick, brown matting that hung over his shoulders, down to the pavement like a very long, very cheap, very old and ratty fur stole was his own hair.

My neighbor told me that someone told her that they had tried to cut it off at the hospital emergency room. He'd been knocked over in the street by a truck and taken in by ambulance. He was filthy. They cut off his layers of dirty clothes to get at his wounds, and the orderlies were trying to saw through his matted hair. It was hard enough to get scissors through, but he was fighting them. His hair, it's length, it's mattedness had significance for him. He thrashed and yelled as if he was convinced that he'd die if they cut it off.

The head ER nurse, a born diplomat, stopped the fray, and approaching him not as a crazy man who lives on the street, but as a human being deserving of respect, asked him if he would allow them to wash and disinfect it--it was full of vermin.

He calmed down immediately and agreed to that.

That was two or three years ago. He probably hasn't washed his body or his hair, or changed his clothes, since.

He is on the streets at all hours in all weathers. He leans heavily on a silver aluminium walker. He moves slowly. Sometimes he stands still for a very long time, as if frozen by some memory, as if time has stopped for him. Sometimes he sits on the weedy planter by the yoga studio across the street from the bank.

I don't know what he eats or drinks. His layers and layers of clothing make him look big. But, he could be almost a skeleton underneath them.

The woman who told me about the hospital incident also told me that someone at the hospital said that the man seemed lucid and carried on an intelligent conversation. But, the story is that he came back from fighting in Viet Nam only to have his wife and children die in a car accident a few weeks later. At that he seems to have moved outdoors and become a town fixture. He has, it is said, family in town. Maybe they feed him or give him money.

I am ashamed of myself. I want to help him, but I don't want anything to do with him. I imagine approaching him and saying hello, as if were an ordinary guy. But, I can't imagine anything past that. And, I'd be doing that for myself, not for him, to prove what a kind person I am, while not kind at all, just curious and wanting to be thought well of.