Lost: One photo...

taken by my father, Howard Maxwell, of one Mr. Dougherty, a hermit who lived in Elysian Park near downtown Los Angeles in the early 1950’s. Before the term “homeless” entered our daily lexicon, Mr. Dougherty lived out-of-doors in the park. He wore a shabby tweed sports coat, with half a dozen short, stubby sharpened pencils, points up, in the breast pocket. He also wore an enigmatic smile.

Intrigued by his demeanor, the pristine pencils, and small pad of paper displayed with care in that pocket, Howard interviewed and photographed Mr. Dougherty for a human interest story that ran in the Los Angeles Times, where my dad was employed as a staff photographer. Mr. Dougherty told my dad that he could not read, that he signed his name with an “X”, but that he kept his pencils ever at-the-ready, just in case inspiration struck him. Dad said there was a bright twinkle in his eye as he spoke.

Hearing this story, when I was a child, touched my heart. It troubled me that the grown-ups relayed his tale looking down their noses, pinkies up, with a touch of meanness in their voices, as if his “preparedness” was a joke only they could understand.

What if inspiration did strike him, and he didn’t have the tools at hand to capture it? I’ve certainly been caught-out with no paper and pencil, when a song has entered my head, while driving down the road, and I wanted to jot it down, or a particularly gorgeous cast of the light was showing off in the sky and I wanted to capture it. Alas, no camera.

Perhaps, Mr. Dougherty’s deep connection with the “out of doors” from which many of us house-dwellers are disconnected, was something that inspired him daily, and he was only waiting for divine inspiration to teach him how to capture it on paper… with words or pictures. He certainly knew how to speak, and didn’t seem at all reticent to converse with my father.

I’d like to think that my dad’s intent was pure; that he saw in Mr. Dougherty a quiet dignity, and that it troubled him too, that his colleagues and friends, and even my mother, were off-base in their derision. I’d like to think Howard wanted to inspire Los Angeles with the simple, unaffected dearness of one corner of humanity.

Kindness and open-heartedness inspire me.

Recently, a colleague shared with me how she figured out a way to connect with an elderly woman she’d seen several times from a distance in her neighborhood. It seems that the image of the woman’s bent figure, painfully slow gait, and utter aloneness touched my colleague’s heart with compassion. After perhaps a week, J finally recognized her stooped posture right up close, in front of her, in line at the grocery store. A conversation unfolded organically. The old woman’s face lit up, J said, just to have another human reach out to her. Now they wave and smile at one another in passing. I was moved to tears by J’s tender persistence to find just the right bridge to walk over and acknowledge and say “howdy” to a familiar stranger in her hometown.

I certainly know very shy places inside myself, that at times keep me from reaching out to others, even when I’m longing to give or receive contact.

What might our world be like if we erred on the side of thinking that everyone, on some level, desires contact with others of their species? What if we, like my colleague J, sought and found an opportunity to acknowledge the humanity of a seemingly lost soul? A simple smile with eyes open to receive another’s human essence may shift something in both hearts.

Namasté is a greeting on the streets in India, not just an oooey, ooooey saying at the end of a yoga class. Ram Dass is credited with this definition:

Namasté… I honor the place in you
in which the entire universe dwells.
I honor the place in you which is of love,
or truth, of light, and of peace.
When you are in that place in you, and
I am in that place in me,
We are One


God/Nature/Humanity has many faces - including our own.

A woman I got to know a little bit at a recent women's retreat shared a practice of setting aside 50 one dollar bills each month to be kept ever at-the-ready. When she sees someone who looks as if s/he could use a buck or two, she extends her hand, her heart, and a genuine eye-to-eye smile with a couple of bills. Such a simple act, honoring that place which is or light, of love, of truth, and perhaps hungry and down on her/his luck.





I wish I could find the lost box of photos that was always in the living room cupboard as I was growing up. So many of my father’s photos were brilliant capturings of beautiful souls, tortured souls, and the wreckage of acts of human souls gone astray from the blueprint of their uniquely human and perhaps meant-to-be humane journey.

Is there a GPS App for getting our lost parts back on track?