I thought I saw my former Los Angeles neighbor, Sarah, in Lincoln recently. She was standing at the intersection of South 27th Street and Nebraska Parkway holding a cardboard sign. The placard said she was homeless. Still.
Obviously, it wasn’t Los Angeles Sarah, the name I gave to a woman who 40 years ago slept in doorways, panhandled in front of Quinn’s Grocery Store and wandered our middle-class neighborhood of duplexes, gift shops, restaurants and art galleries near the intersection of Melrose and La Cienega.
Although I spoke to her several times, she never responded nor acknowledged me, so I never actually met her or knew her real name. She was in her own world, one that seemed a million miles from the one in which she found herself. I wrote a piece about Sarah many years ago because of the impact she had on me…