Nataline Viray-Fung spent weeks last winter admiring the unconventional artistic displays that kept popping up on the sidewalk along her route to USC -- the geometric sculpture of paper cups, the totem poles of bent hubcaps, the stack of child-sized pink chairs adorned with deflated soccer balls.
They were the oddball inventions of a homeless man, who Viray-Fung came to consider a buddy. "I felt compelled to meet him," she said, because "whoever has enough sense of themselves to create art when they are homeless is someone worth knowing."
Viray-Fung knows a bit about homelessness, and what it can do to the spirit.
Today, the 32-year-old is a USC law school graduate, studying for the bar exam. But a few years back, she was a resident of Chicago, with no money and no address.
She spent weeks sleeping in her car or crashing on friends' sofas. "It was the most stressful thing I've ever lived through," she said. "The trauma of ending up with no home, not knowing where you're going to sleep.
"I was a mess. . . . I don't think anybody knew what to do about me."
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The "artist" Viray-Fung befriended was Eddie Dotson, a homeless man I first wrote about in February when his elaborately furnished sidewalk shelter captured my attention. My columns made their way to his family in Austin, they reunited and he recently moved back to his hometown, where he lives in his daughter's condominium.
I've realized -- from readers' e-mails since -- that long before I wrote about him, Eddie and his shelter at the 110 Freeway exit ramp had become a local curiosity, among football fans on their way to USC games, students and local workers.
I heard from dozens of readers who grew accustomed to seeing him on their daily commutes -- vanpoolers who told me they "could not wait to leave work to see what he had added to his home that day," and carpooling mothers who welcomed the opportunity to talk to their young passengers about poverty, compassion and gratitude.
Edna Arteaga fielded her children's comments as she pulled off the freeway on their way to school each morning. "My son would say that this man had more furniture than we did, and we would laugh at how we lived in a house and we had less than him," she said. "And I would tell myself how ironic life was."
Some people, like Viray-Fung, went further. She visited Eddie almost every week, taking food and fussing over his puppy. He was a settling force, she said, as they talked about her law school studies. "I was always so anxious," she told me. "And he was always so calm."
