Every morning at ten o’clock, as I stood at the kitchen sink and finished the breakfast dishes, I could hear him pecking up the street on his wooden leg. I lived in the basement of a remodelled corner house in the East Fifties. From the front windows on First Avenue I could almost see the East River—anyway, I could hear the boat whistles. The apartment ran the length of the house, so that the kitchen at the back and the small garden adjoining it were adjacent to the side street. I called that tiny patch of ground a garden, and so did the real-estate man who leased me the place, but it held little privacy. It was separated from the street only by a high railing, and passersby could almost tell what we were drinking on those afternoons when I entertained my friends out of doors.
He would stop outside the railing and call to me through the open kitchen door. The first time he appeared, I was about to refuse whatever appeal he might make, for I was continually pestered by tramps and I had grown hard. Then I saw the wooden leg. There was a piece of ham in the icebox, and I cut some bread, buttered it, and made him a sandwich. I handed it to him through the railing and gave him a glass of milk. He put down the small bundle of wood he was carrying and found a niche between my garden and the next house, where he sat down.
“My breakfast nook,” he said. He told me times were hard, a fact of which I was not entirely unaware myself. He had been a piano-maker, he said, but pianos weren’t what they used to be. “The radio, you know, lady.” I said I knew. He went on to tell me that he lived in a cellar on First Avenue and picked up a few cents every day selling wood. When he had finished his breakfast, I offered him a cigarette. He snatched at it so eagerly that I gave him the remainder of the pack and some matches.
These morning calls continued for weeks. I always gave my visitor a sandwich, and milk in the glass which I kept specially for him on the windowsill. One day he appeared pushing his bundle of wood in a baby carriage.
“It’s a great help, lady,” he said. “I found it in a dump heap.”I made him an egg sandwich that morning, because I had dined out the night before and had no leftovers. It seemed to me that he took it with less relish than usual, and I supposed he didn’t like eggs.
Then he failed to appear for a few days, and I began to worry about him. Each morning I waited for the peck-peck of his wooden leg, and when at last I heard him tapping his way up the street, I ran out into the garden to greet him. There was some nice duck left from the previous night’s dinner, and while duck was not my idea of breakfast, I knew my friend must have less conventional notions about diet.
“Hello!” I called. “I’ve been looking out for you.”
He stopped reluctantly. “Thanks, lady,” he said, “but the people across the street are expecting me, I guess. They been feeding me lately. Thanks just the same.”
There was a smart private house across the street, and the people who lived there gave big dinner parties. Almost every evening I watched the arrival of fashionably dressed guests in limousines. They must have had very nice leftovers.
I never met my friend again. He went all around the block to avoid my house. I guess he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. ♦
From Wikipedia:
Dorothy Day, Obl.S.B., (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist, social activist, and Catholic convert.
Dorothy Day became famous after her conversion. She initially lived a bohemian lifestyle before becoming Catholic. This conversion is described in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness.
Day's social activism is also described in her autobiography. In 1917 she was imprisoned as a member of suffragist Alice Paul's nonviolent Silent Sentinels. In the 1930s, Day worked closely with fellow activist Peter Maurin to establish the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist movement that combines direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. She practiced civil disobedience, which led to additional arrests in 1955, 1957, and in 1973 at the age of seventy-five.
Day was also an active journalist, and described her social activism in her writings. As part of the Catholic Worker Movement, Day co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933, and served as its editor from 1933 until her death in 1980. In this newspaper, Day advocated the Catholic economic theory of distributism, which she considered a third way between capitalism and socialism. Her activism and writing gave her a national reputation as a political radical, perhaps the most famous radical in American Catholic Church history.
Dorothy Day's life is an inspiration for the Catholic Church. Pope Benedict XVI used her conversion story as an example of how to "journey towards faith... in a secularized environment." Pope Francis included her in a short list of exemplary Americans, together with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thomas Merton, in his address before the United States Congress. The Church has opened the cause for Day's possible canonization, which was accepted by the Holy See for investigation. Due to this, the Church refers to her with the title of Servant of God.