Before we moved to Weymouth, when I was four and until I was twelve, we lived at 17 Parkman Street, near Melville Avenue and the Fields Corner subway station. There were four or five elderly Irish bachelors on our street, surrounded by loud families with lots of kids. Our family of five children was average. Families of eight and ten children were ordinary. Only the Sweeneys, with their seventeen children, stood out.

We lived next door to a man with one arm named Mr. Shields. My mother told me that he had been a hobo during the Depression and had lost his arm under the wheels of a train. I was mesmerized by his empty sleeve and the thought of his hobo past, and I spied on him while hiding behind the blackberry bushes. He lived with his ancient mother and didn’t leave the house very often. A great depression hung over him. He was still a hobo though he had a home.

Another old hobo, nameless, used to come to the door with a scythe and offer to cut the grass in the backyard for a little money. The hobo mystique of freedom and shabbiness was alive and well then, at least among the people I knew, who did not value respectability above all things. On Halloween in the early 1960s, the streets were filled with hobos carrying brown paper bags, as this was the costume of first and last resort for boys and girls in our neighborhood. You could always find dirty old men’s clothes and hats around the house. Your own dirty old man, or someone else’s, could let you borrow stuff.