For the past few weeks, I've walked by him in the mornings. Asleep, curled up on his side, clothes askew, no shoes, hands tucked under his head, nothing but a few pieces of cardboard separating his body from the sidewalk. A collection of food containers, bottles, cans, newspapers and other pieces of detritus lying a few feet away from him. Sometimes there's even a book. Sometimes he's there in the evenings too. Clearly he's living there in the alley I walk through to get to my office. I don't see him as a threat, so I haven't changed my route. Maybe I'm naive. This news would most certainly worry most of my friends and family. But there are always people walking through the alley, so my thoughts are about the well-being of this man, and not my safety. It's hard to even call it an alley; after all, it has a name: Center Lane. It's wide enough for traffic to drive through it. I did worry when Jesse came to work with me one morning for a few hours. We were halfway down the alley before I started thinking about what we would say if we saw the man. Explaining homelessness was not a conversation I felt up for that morning. But he wasn't there, and I didn't have to deal with it. I'm not sure I could ever satisfy all his questions about why someone is sleeping on the sidewalk.