Change. Maybe

Mack Hall

Downtown Beaumont is a great place for photography. Many buildings there are survivors of a happier architectural age and display remarkable artistry in their brickwork, stonework, glass, and iron. Note, for instance, the detail work on and around the Hotel Beaumont and the Jefferson Theatre. Other structures, in a state of decay or repair, present their own transient appeal as they are adapted or bulldozed for Beaumont’s renascent prosperity. We’d better click before they’re replaced by fake new fronts advertising Data Solutions, Antique Solutions, Insurance Solutions, Coffee Solutions, and Sobriety Solutions (formerly known as the Kit-Kat Club).

Is there a new business without “Solutions” as part of its name? A shopper might want a coat, a cup of coffee, a book, or a cigar; he seldom wants a solution. Does one walk into a sporting goods store and ask for that great-looking solution he saw advertised? Does anyone sit down in a café’ and ask for a cup of solution?

In front of the Hotel Beaumont, now a retirement home, I saw several folks taking the air and having a smoke and laughing merrily, wholly unimpressed that only a few hours before Senator If-You-Mention-My-Middle-Name-You’re-a-Meanie and his entourage had passed by. The chairman of this informal committee was a large-ish old gentleman with a cowboy hat, a prosperous waistline, and a big ol’ cigar, and he was enjoying life immensely. Some will sniff disapprovingly and maintain that this health-crime should have been stopped by the Don’t-You-Know-That’s-Bad-For-You Miz Grundy Police, but I say that if you’ve made it to eighty you’ve won, and have earned a cigar and a good laugh with friends on a soft evening.

On the east side of the Jefferson Theatre I spotted a blanket, a coat, and a few other trifles indicating that this was the world headquarters of someone whose world is now the streets. Atop this modest assemblage some kind soul had left a sandwich or a burger in a fast-foot bag, adding a smiley-face and “Enjoy!”

Before large audiences, perhaps in the Jefferson Theatre itself, a brick wall away from the coat, the blanket, and the sandwich, deeply concerned men and women in nice suits give speeches proposing solutions – solutions again -- for the homeless. Someone happily had a more immediate solution: give the homeless a fresh sandwich.

This solution would probably not occur to a bishop whose communications with poor people are pretty much limited to asking them to give him more money.

The secular government probably wouldn’t like this solution because the sandwich was not served inside an inspected establishment by a vaccinated person wearing a hair net and gloves.

The Diet Ogpu would demand to know if the sandwich was vegan, or if it consisted of parts of an animal that died unhappy and without a vision for the future.

If we wait on those folks, nothing will get done. Do we want change? Well, someone made a change one evening on a Beaumont street, real change, neatly packaged not in senate bills or proposals or speeches, but in a sandwich for someone who needed it.