Eden Onpeng

As kids, my little brother and I would ride our bikes along the bike path, and along the way we would encounter this young homeless guy and say hi. He was usually doing his own thing, but I forget what now. Probably just hanging around. At some point we stopped to offer him some money, about a dollar or two.

“No thanks,” he said, squinting up at us with a face that resembled a rugged Jason Mraz—brown hair, blue eyes, the beginnings of crow’s feet. “I don’t take money from kids.”

We offered him a snack-sized bag of Cheetos from our biking snacks stash, which he accepted.

Most of our conversations were about snacks that my brother and I wanted to give him. He didn’t talk much about his life or how he had ended up homeless and we didn’t ask.

Eventually we stopped seeing him on the trail.

A few years later, my brother and I went to a nearby store and saw a brown-haired homeless guy resembling Jason Mraz laughing to himself while smashing some apples with his feet in the parking lot. If he recognized me and my brother, he didn’t show it at all.

But at the time my brother and I drew the same connection in our heads: our guy had gone crazy.

We never saw him again.  

I look back at those times and think about how we didn’t think much of approaching a homeless guy at the time. Nowadays I’m a lot more wary of strangers. Maybe it’s from all those crime documentaries, or maybe I’m just more aware of the ugly parts of human nature now.