Santa

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. – Author Unknown

Dane Hobbs didn’t have a TV or a car or even a cell phone. He had a wallet for awhile, but one day that got stolen, and with it went his license, library card and Social Security card, so he didn’t have those any more either. He didn’t even have his name, either, not really. When people asked him what his name was after that, he just told them he didn’t have one. Someone had taken it, he said. They’d needed it more.

So people called him Santa, because he had a big white beard and always smiled and laughed. It’s funny, because he’s the anti-Santa. He couldn’t give presents to anybody.

But Santa had one thing nobody has, but everybody has. He had the biggest house in the world, many said he once told them, because the sky was his roof.

Santa was a homeless man who died in August 2009. A 17-year-old girl held a food drive in his honor the Saturday before Christmas, which is how I met him, at least in a way.

This was an unusual guy.

To begin with, he was homeless by choice. Which maybe just means he was insane, but as I talked to people, it became clear that wasn’t the case. People said he was intelligent; some even said he was wise. Life didn’t put him on the streets, sleeping under nothing but the sky. No, apparently 12 years ago, he just put himself there. Before that he was a welder or technician or plumber of sorts. He had myriad handyman-job certifications.

But apparently he was no beggar, either. He held no signs. He never asked for as much as a cup of water. Sometimes he’d buy someone else a Pepsi. And he kept himself neat, too. He never smelled particularly horrible, never appeared unbathed, never wore especially dirty clothes. One lady once said he once told her he washed his clothes in a bucket.

And another thing about him, maybe the thing that made the least (or most) sense: he always seemed happy. Like, really happy.

I wish I’d met this Santa. I heard about him before the food drive. There’s something – I don’t know if inspiring is the right word. Evocative, maybe? – evocative about him, though, and his story. I wonder so much about him. I want to talk to more people about him. But something in me senses there’s nothing more I should know about him. Something says I know all I need to know. All I really needed to know was summed up by what Santa’s brother, Bill Hobbs once told the newspaper: “He just wanted the simple things in life. He didn’t care anything about the fancy stuff.”

We care lots about fancy things, don’t we? I do. I have a fancy computer, a fancy iPod Touch, a fancy new HDTV, a fancy (enough) Ford Explorer, a fancy pair of running shoes, a fancy leather-strapped watch. Many of these things are gifts, but some are not, and the gifts are things I can’t see myself doing too much without.

Since learning about Santa, I’ve thought a lot about what it would be like to throw a pair of jeans and a t-shirt into a backpack, a couple of books, a few hundred dollars, and leave everything else behind. Maybe I’d give it away. I wonder what life would be like if lived on foot, dependent on others, a la The Road To Lebanon, that film project by Kelley Stracke.

This whole episode, this learning about Santa and wishing I’d known him and getting to know him through those who already do, reminds me a lot of the Maurel Domingo tragedy I wrote about for The Collegiate during my senior year at Barton. Maurel was one of those truly inspiring people, according to those who knew him, and in talking to them I was racked with the question: why did God take him so soon?

I feel similarly about Santa. I don’t think God took him too soon or anything. He was in his fifties, maybe even his sixties. He touched a lot of lives. And although nobody specifically said so, I think Santa knew God. This is speculation, pure speculation. But one who is so aware of the way the world works, to the point of realizing he needs nothing it offers, that he needs nothing the overwhelming majority of people either have or want to have. He believes all that’s necessary for life is food, water, and a roof made out of sky.

Of course, I couldn’t leave everything behind and live out of a backpack. I’m married, and happily so. My career’s going well. I’m doing what I know I’m supposed to be doing. I wrote a column once about Maurel, exploring why someone so young would be gone so soon. In like fashion I’m now exploring why someone so smart would live so….homelessly? Freely? Selflessly? Did he truly feel called to give everything up the way he did?

But like at the end of that column about Maurel, I end this one in similar fashion: why not me? Why am I not called to a homeless life? Why do I have everything I have?

I don’t know exactly, yet. But I know one reason why not. Like Santa, my life’s not meant to be about getting fancy things.

I thought I’d close this out with that sentence, but another thought just popped in my head: Santa wasn’t really an anti-Santa after all. He gave a lot to a lot of people. He listened when they needed to talk and he talked when they wanted to listen, and smiled when they wanted to help. He made lots of people feel really good about themselves. He made lots of people realize a lot of truth.

“He did a lot more for me than I did for him,” one lady once told the local newspaper.

So Santa did give people things. They just weren’t fancy, shiny things.

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