THE ASK Do you have any belts
A belt is one of the most common things the men ask me for down below, and it's one of the things we almost never have. It's a commodity item down there. The minute a usable one comes in it's gone, the way anything useful and durable goes. So most days the honest answer is no, sorry, not today.
Early on, if I happened to have one on, I'd just take mine off and hand it over. It was always accepted graciously. I want to be clear that there was nothing noble in it. It wasn't generosity so much as the belt I happened to be wearing, and a man in front of me who needed one more than I did. I did that a handful of times before I noticed I was starting to run low on belts myself.
AT HOME My version of the story
When I told my wife about it, I'd laugh and say it was karma. I'd put on some weight, my pants had been "shrinking," and apparently the universe had finally found a use for the belt I no longer entirely needed. It was a good line. I got a couple of weeks out of it at the dinner table.
My shrinking pants, it turned out, were serving a purpose.
Then it stopped being a line and started being the thing I actually thought about on the drive home.
THE TURN Why a man needs a belt he doesn't own
Yes, a belt is a small thing. I'm not going to pretend a strip of leather is the center of anyone's hardship. But I did start paying attention to why so many of these men needed a belt they didn't already have, and the answer sits in two parts, stacked on top of each other.
The first part is the clothes. They're donated, which means they were sized for whoever gave them up, not for the man wearing them now. You take what comes in your general direction and you make it work. A waistband that fit the donor rarely fits you.
The second part is the body underneath the clothes, and this is the one that stayed with me. Out here food is not a given. It comes in stretches, with gaps in between, and a body that misses enough meals gets thinner whether the man wanted to lose the weight or not. Pants that hang fine on a fed man hang off a hungry one. The belt is just what closes the difference so he can walk out the door with his pants up.
I may be reading more into it than a man asking for a belt intends. But I don't think I'm reading it wrong.
THE QUESTION So what is it really measuring
My pants got tighter because I eat too well. Theirs got looser because they don't eat enough. Same garment, same notch on the same kind of belt, telling two stories that could not be further apart. That's the part the joke was hiding from me.
So I keep coming back to the question. When a man down below asks me for a belt, what is the belt really measuring? It isn't measuring his waist. It's measuring the distance between the size of what we give and the size of the people we hand it to. It's measuring weeks of skipped meals, marked off one tightened notch at a time. It's measuring how much of homelessness is just plain hunger wearing somebody else's clothes.