Suzanne Describes Herself as an
89-Year-Old Homeless Person of Privilege
Long before I met Suzanne, I was uneasy with the phrase “homeless person.” It seemed to flatten too many lives into one shame-colored noun. The older words — vagrant, hobo, derelict, transient, drifter — have mostly fallen out of favor. But “homeless” remains, clinical and expansive, at once a description and a verdict.
Suzanne sleeps in a sedan on the industrial edge of Goleta, but to call her homeless is too small a box to fit her life. She has lived in cabins, shelters, halfway houses, and tents. She has worked inside the system and refused it. At 89, she owns almost nothing, and still, she is not poor. She is, in her words, a privileged homeless person — a phrase that sounds like an oxymoron until you watch her mix berries in a baby blender plugged into a picnic-table outlet at a park.
“I have been outside, by myself, for 57 years,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m amazed I’m still alive.”…