The snoring homeless man in my office

We had what I consider to be a mild winter. Sure, there was snow and a couple of decent storms, but for me, nothing to complain about.

In the middle of December my youngest child came to me as we were walking downtown, doing some holiday shopping, and she said, "daddy, does that homeless man get cold?"

That is one of the sweet things about children, they remind us that all those things we try to avoid in our lives, homeless people and getting old, are still right there, if we would just bother to pay attention.

"Why yes," honey, I said, "they do get cold."

"Why do they stay outside?"

See, children get to a certain age and it is hard to deal with them in reality. When she was much younger, I could just say things like "because" or something and her tiny little brain would focus on something else, like a butterfly fluttering nearby and that would be the end of it.

Now she has focus and inquisitiveness and all sorts of questions. See, we are not a perfect world, or a perfect country. I am not sure what the options would be, but in some ways, we do not always do what is best for the people who really need help. My daughter, that sweet young girl, does not understand spending priorities. We think it is more important to invade, say, Iraq or Libya, instead of funding mental health and addiction programs. Priorities, we have them and children do not understand such things.

I told her people make choices in life and sometimes those choices lead to sleeping in the street. She was outraged, who would make such a choice, it was cold out.

We walked around for a while longer. She went into a bakery to get a hot roll and I stood outside and called my fiance. We were chatting and planning our upcoming wedding and I lost track of time, turned around and my daughter was standing next to me, and next to her was Herman, the homeless guy she adopted.

We spent the better part of late winter and early spring housing Herman. For the most part my daughter made him meals and made sure he was enjoying the comforts of the cable channels and flat screen high definition television. He liked coffee, so we were always buying coffee. A couple of times he called in orders for Chinese food, but he never bothered to order dishes I was fond of. Herman was fun. He would sprawl out on the couch and just fall asleep, his feet dangling off the edge. Sometimes I would be carrying my briefcase in from the car, late afternoon, and Herman would be sleeping in the flower garden, enjoying a cold nap.

As spring started to warm up the region and flowers began to unfurl from the ground, Herman said it was probably time for him to move on. We stood on our front porch, watching with a certain fondness as Herman slowly walked down our street, stopping once to rifle through a neighbors trash can. Then he turned the corner and was gone.

I looked at my daughter, proud that she righted an injustice and cared enough to help a fellow person who was down on their luck. I smiled, she said why was I smiling and I told her how proud I was of her. She held her nose and said, "he sure did stink, next time, let's adopt a kitty."

Lesson learned.