I was irritated with my wife. After waiting for several weeks to carve out some free time to look for a new set of night tables (her own night table had collapsed under the weight of books), we were finally on our way to buy new ones when my wife stopped to talk to a stranger near our house. Though the incident happened some time ago, I only understood its import this morning upon reading a poem by the late Jack Agüeros, a New York poet of Puerto Rican parents, which brought that event back to my mind. But I am jumping ahead, so let me backtrack.

I was walking with my wife, Silvia, to the bus stop when a young man passed in front of us. He was probably of East Indian descent, shabbily dressed and talking to himself, the last being not so unusual in and of itself for New York City. But what suggested he wasn’t of sound mind was that on that frigid morning he was shoeless, his feet dirty and calloused.

This poor man wasn’t an unusual case. After the COVID pandemic, the streets of New York became crowded with poor and homeless people, which tend to be notoriously more frequent in certain areas of the city to the dismay of its residents, who feel threatened by them. In 2023, 1.5 million New Yorkers lived at or below the official federal poverty level, which are about almost 190,000 more than in 2019 before the pandemic hit.

Those numbers, however, don’t reflect the grim state of the city. Following the pandemic, and the recession that it provoked, the extremely high inflation rates forced many residents to relocate to places they could afford. This happened because the increasing costs of living in the city eroded most of the wage increases of the previous year. As a result, the median household income was lower in 2023 than in 2022.

At the same time, racial disparities were exacerbated. While after the pandemic the proportion of White New Yorkers living in poverty was lower than before the pandemic, a substantial number of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers continue to experience high rates of poverty. While immigrants experienced a significant raise in poverty, the increase among White residents was much lower.

Now, seeing this poor man’s plight, my wife Silvia asked him, “Sir, do you need shoes?” The man looked surprised, and mumbled a response which my wife took as a positive answer. Upon hearing that, she said to me, “Just wait a few minutes,” turned back and walked toward our house.

I didn’t understand what was happening. We were very short of time and my wife was going back to pick some shoes for a man she didn’t know. I was frustrated, since we still had many errands to do, but I didn’t have any choice but to wait for her. In the meantime, the man went to sit on a bench nearby. I decided to keep an eye on him, to make sure that he would wait for her and not walk away. I tried to engage him in conversation but was unable to. He obviously preferred to continue inhabiting his own world. How my wife was able to reach him escapes me.

My wife’s errand was taking more time than I had anticipated and, at a moment when I wasn’t paying attention to him, the man disappeared.

“Well,” I said to myself, “that will show her that she can’t be a Good Samaritan all the time…” I walked up the avenue and down and up a side street, but couldn’t see him.

Finally, frustrated, I retraced my steps and went back home to tell my wife what had happened. Just as I turned a corner, however, I saw her talking to the shoeless man. (He had gone back in the same direction as my wife.) She was handing him a pair of practically new shoes, part of a bunch that we had decided to donate to a homeless shelter.

“Most probably,” I thought, “he will now go and try to sell the shoes.” I was wrong again. My wife’s generous thoughts prevailed over what I believed was my common sense. While sitting waiting for the bus we saw the young man walk by again, proudly wearing his new set of shoes, a wide smile on his face. It was the man’s pleasure as well as my wife’s unassuming kindness that I recalled upon reading months later a poem by Jack Agüeros. In his “Psalm for Distribution,” Agüeros, a New York poet of the dispossessed, wrote:

Lord on 8th Street
between 6th Avenue and Broadway
there are enough shoe stores
with enough shoes
to make me wonder
why there are shoeless people
on the earth.

Lord,
You have to fire the Angel
in charge of distribution.

The poem is set a few blocks away from where this incident took place.