The third person whom I wanted to mention here is almost world famous in New Orleans - as far as street people go. Almost everyone knows who you're talking about when you describe the crazy old lady who used to go around wearing hard hats and motorcycle helmets all the time. She was real old and looked to be very decrepit. She was white, with white hair, about 5'2" and about a hundred pounds (not a very big thing). They say she wore those metallic helmets around because she believed that the government was beaming spy rays into her head from all the street lights and telephone poles. She must have been quite disturbed, or she had caught on to something that we all need to be aware of! She dressed herself in big plastic bags, usually black and/or blue, and she carried everything that she had around in a smaller plastic bag. She didn't seem to live anywhere in particular, but I did see her sleeping a few times in a big arched doorway on the side of a building on Prytania Street just across the way from Lafayette Cemetery #1.

This old woman was a walker, not a talker. I saw her walk from way uptown clear to the lower edge of the French Quarter in a day (that's miles, to be sure). She walked and walked and walked all over the place! Once, she wandered into a hotel downtown where I was working as a concierge during college. She walked back to the restaurant, then came out to the lobby and started to call all of the ladies who were present a bitch. The management told me to escort her off of the premises, but I just kind of followed her around until she finally hit the door. And then, later on, I used to see her pass by the art gallery on Royal Street where I was a consultant. The owner told me that he had actually exchanged words with her once. Apparently, she went around trying to sell old Mardi Gras throw-beads that she found in gutters and hanging from trees (after the parade season, you see these damned beads everywhere in New Orleans; they throw them from floats, and grown men and women act like three-year-olds grabbing at one another for those worthless things). She said that she charmed them and would sell you one for five bucks. One bead for five dollars! Well, my friend, the gallery owner, declined the offer, so she went off and told him that she was going to put a bad, bad curse on him then. This kind of worried him (he was an artist), so he followed after her and insisted that she sell him a bead. She told him to leave her alone and to get away from her! But he persisted, and, finally, she gave him one. I don't know if it brought him any luck, though. I just hope she got a warm meal out of it. (Who was crazier?)

That's the only time that I had ever heard of her actually saying anything, when she was peddling off her lucky beads. I often used to consider buying one of her beads just to give her a little money to eat with, but I was usually either too broke or had just given all the change in my pocket to some other homeless person before I would happen to pass her way. The poor thing obviously had nobody caring for her, and she seemed to be in need of a little care. I hate to think of the things that could happen to an old woman out on the streets in her predicament. How many times had she been raped? How many times had she been mugged or molested? There are those who would say, "Well, she made her bed, so she has to lie in it!" What bed? Why would anyone do that to himself or herself if he or she were actually in control of his or her life? I'm always so amazed to hear calloused people make careless remarks like, "That's the life that they've chosen for themselves," or, "They wouldn't be there if they didn't want to be there!" I'd like to know what those people would have to say if they ever found themselves in such circumstances as being homeless and living in the streets. It can be a very fast and merciless process these days. All you have to do is lose your job for some reason, like the boss's son graduated and needed it, especially when your rent is two or three months late because you had to pay for some badly needed medical procedure because your job didn't provide enough insurance coverage or you just couldn't afford any insurance (like three quarters of the American population). Voilà - street person! (Well, you made your bed . . . .) It would only take a month or two of living out in the streets to turn me into a schizophrenic. Of course, there are agencies to help those out on the streets who are in need. But those agencies are kind of hard to get in touch with when you're schizophrenic and can hardly get in touch with your own self 75% of the time. But old Hard Hat suffered in silence. Her stoicism was her gift.

Control is the key word in the vocabularies of those who issue forth such intellectually impotent remarks as, "They made their beds, now they can lie in them." These people seem to think that if such people as the homeless maintain control over their lives - their expenses, etc. - they'd not end up out on the streets. But, as I started to lead up to before, control is just an illusion that we humans create in order to perceive some semblance of stability in the world, and in life. It can happen so fast, even if you lead an ideally organized and responsible life. Your kidneys give out due to some hereditary disorder that you never knew about! The company you work for goes out of business! Boom! Boom! You're out (on the street)! It's that simple. You would get no warnings. You would get no opportunity to step back to look at the situation and to solve the problems underlying it all. Boom! Okay, you graduated from high school, even went to college and earned a degree. Your family is there to help you out. But what if you couldn't make it through high school because you had to work to help support your family? Or what if you have a college degree, but you get caught too far up in the tough times caused for everyone during a recession, and you have no family really who can help you see it through the hard times? What then? Boom! During the early part of the 1990s, the recession made it so bad for so many that it was even hard to get into the army! (But there was always jail - three squares a day, shelter and lots of company all the time.) Like I said, a month or two, and I would be a bona fide madman - either that, or dead. (I'd prefer the latter.)

To arrive at the insight that one is merely average, whether the revelation is a sudden or gradual thing, is an uncomfortable, unsettling situation for too many of us. The human thing has got a hold of too many of us. Average - that thing which we all seem to be striving for - is actually not what we strive for. It's a heart break when you realize that your dreams are just that (dreams), and that you'll probably never see what used to appear quite possible materialize into self-fulfillment. Really, to be above average is our secret goal in life. But we can't all be president or Elvis or a Nobel Prize winner. We can't all earn Ph.D.s or even high school diplomas. Some of us have to lose so that some of us can win and, thusly, be called "above average."

So, the majority of us find ourselves in the average group of people - that's what being average is all about. It's really funny how we try so hard to be average and fit in when we're adolescents, but then we shoot for such lofty goals when we finally wake up from that torturing stage of human development and become adults. And just as hormones disrupt a teenager's life to the extremist degree, so does a certain drive that kicks in on emerging adults which causes them to develop a drive to "make it" in life. "Making it," however, always seems to be viewed by the young adult as meaning a six figure income, or achieving great fame or glory. "Making it" never seems to mean simply achieving a comfortable, yet fulfilling existence, regardless of whether or not that existence may appear to be humble or meager compared to lofty, lofty plans (dreams). Dreams are fine - they nourish growing souls. But, just as with anything else in this existence, they should be entertained in moderation or they, like a drug, may become addicting and very painful to withdraw from. One possible result could be a crash landing in that taboo-world of the "below average." Worse yet, one could find himself or herself sharing the same world that is haunted by the likes of Mammer Jammer, Big Red and Hard Hat. There can be worse yet, but you're not likely to see much of that in America, unless you take a trip through places like Harlem in New York, or the Appalachian Mountains, or the Atchafalaya River Basin in Louisiana where some of the lowest of the low still pilot pathetic, leaky little boats around, trolling for a night's meal of crawfish. (But, frankly, I'd rather be aware of the crawfish that I was scraping up from the muddy swamp bottom, than be alone and out wandering the streets of a big dirty city like New Orleans, and hardly aware of my own senses.)

So, to be average is a fine thing. Pressure to be above average shouldn't be given in to at all, and the humility that we self-impose on ourselves for being below average shouldn't be contemplated, either. Of course, being above-average and staying there for some can be as difficult as shooting for stars is for others, so maybe that's a clue to those of us in that predicament that we're getting too carried away and that we need to take it a little slower and a little easier on ourselves.

Mother Theresa had the right idea. She strived to be as low as they come. And what did it get her? A Nobel Prize!