Is he just a bum? Or a woman's beloved father? A Thanksgiving tale

It was just after 9 p.m. last Thursday night, and I was walking past the L.A. Farmer’s Market on my way out from The Grove. I noticed a young woman, in her early 20s, standing in the doorway of a darkened optometry shop and calling out to someone who appeared to be just another homeless man in L.A.

“Come on! It’s Ok! Come inside!” She was calling out to the man, who sat in tattered clothes with a matted beard and a blank stare that seemed to indicate his mind had long since drifted away from there. She waved her hands insistently towards herself, as extra encouragement for him to get up and move towards her. But he kept sitting and staring.

I finally paused and asked if everything was OK. I’ve stumbled across plenty of strange and disturbing incidents in my lifetime, and have tried to help when I can. But instead of looking concerned, the young woman smiled readily and said “I’m OK. That’s my dad.”

I reflexively looked back at the man, who seemed to register a bit of embarrassment. The woman, though, could not have seemed happier and prouder of her old man.

“Really, it’s OK.”

I moved on, looking back over my shoulder as she gave up and went back inside to close her shop and the man stayed sitting outside, his gaze now locked in my direction. I felt like I had just intruded on an ineffably private moment.

And yet that moment nearly moved me to tears on the bus ride home. And it has stayed on my mind in the five days since.

The reason for that is that I feel what I came across was an amazing and pure example of human love and bonding at its finest. If that was really a young woman smiling through the difficulty of dealing with her sadly disabled father, her upbeat sense of dignity offered a lesson to not just myself but to anyone taking a moment to think about family.

Normally, it’s the parent who holds the door open in life for their children, welcoming them no matter what choices their kids make and how much they suffer the consequences. The parent raises the child and then steps in when there’s a real emergency, as the truest safety net a society has to offer.

But these days, as our society ages and the economy weakens, we see and hear about more and more families in which the reverse is happening: the children are taking in and caring for their parents. We hear about the strain of it all, both emotionally and financially. But what we need to remember is that in much of the world, generations caring for each other in both directions is the norm rather than the exception or the result of a dire circumstance.

And it is in moments like that which I saw between a young woman and her seemingly homeless but still loving father that we are reminded of the true power of family. We choose our friends in life, especially as we grow up and move out on our own. We can say that our friends are a second family to us, especially when we’re single. But friends move away and drift out of our lives, or can walk away for good when the heat of an argument becomes seemingly too much to deal with.

On the other hand, we don’t choose our families and who’s in them. We may not even have that much in common with them. But outside of the most horrifically dysfunctional situations in which one must part with one’s family in order to simply survive, we are bound together by a mysterious and inextricable link that lets us know we always have someone watching our back and someone waiting with a hug or a loan to get us through our worst of crises.

So this Thanksgiving, try not to hate on each other too much. Hold your cool, pass the potatoes, carve the turkey and remember that the people in your family surrounding you are gonna be there for you for the rest of your life.