Foraging

Once upon a time—in my far distant youth—I travelled the rails. I rode boxcars. Always by myself, but once I met up with a man named Jake and he tried to teach me the ways of the professional hobo.

One night after hitting a small town in Texas, he took me out foraging for food.

To be concise and succinct about it, the foraging took the form of going to the back doors of houses and asking for a hand out. I had done the same thing on occasion, but my modus operandi consisted of going to a restaurant’s back door.

Anyway, Jake told the eighteen-year-old boy that I was at the time, “The best pickings are in the poor sections of town. You never get turned down. Next are middle class neighborhoods. You stand a fifty-fifty chance in that neck of the woods. Then last are the rich neighborhoods…