If you live in New York and you're a straphanger like me, you're no stranger to being solicited for money on the subway by a homeless or hungry person. When you take the same trains you often see the same people.

There's one fragile-looking, dark-skinned woman who I always see on the number 2 train. Her hair sticks up straight and she's always dressed in men's sweat clothes enveloping her petite frame. She walks through the cars and says, "I'm sorry to bother you-can you spare a quarter-25 cents-sorry...I'm sorry to bother you-can you spare a quarter-25 cents-sorry." It's the obvious look of embarrassment on her gentle face that makes commuters reach into their pockets for her every time.

Then there are always those people working the train cars who were once homeless but now represent whatever organization that helped take them out of a hopeless situation. They wear identification tags and carry a box of food - bananas, sandwiches, and juice - and a collection jar. They give the same speech; they've been trained well.

But tonight there was a man who I had never seen. He stepped onto my train carrying a colossal black duffel bag and an oversized milk crate on his back. The bag was filled with sweatshirts, pants, and shoes and the crate was jam packed with wax paper wrapped sandwiches and warm cans of soda. I could only imagine how heavy his load was. This tall wide man who had to duck when stepping on to the subway car, did everything he could to set his things down gently so as not to disturb the passengers. Once settled, he spoke in a voice that was like a cross between Barry White and Wolfman Jack. He said that he wasn't homeless, but that he had been. He wasn't part of any organization, but that he had spent much of the last ten years of his life carrying clothes and food that he had paid for with his own money or gathered through donations, and going from subway to subway in this way, long before anybody else was. He never stuck to the same trains, but moved around on all the different lines citywide.

He was serious and dedicated but funny. He said when he was starving on the street someone once gave him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He was grateful, but he didn't have anything to drink. "Ever tried to eat a peanut butter sandwich without a beverage?" he asked. "If homelessness don't kill you that might about do it." He got a few laughs from even the most jaded looking passengers.

He reminded us during his speech that homeless people don't usually plan on being in the situation they end up in.

"Do you think when they're little they said, 'Mommy, when I grow up I want to be homeless'?"

There was nothing that felt staged about what he said or did, nothing preachy or didactic. He seemed true; just got up everyday, got his stuff together and did it.

I rarely give money to panhandlers. I'd rather give food if I have something on me. But something about this man made me smile and like the woman next to me and a couple of passengers across the aisle, I found myself digging in my pocket for a stray dollar. Even an awfully hungry looking older man to whom he gave a banana and a coke offered him some spare change from his pocket.

When he'd collected all he could he slung his black bag filled over his shoulder and his food crate across his back without so much as a grunt. As he walked toward the sliding door that lead from one subway car to the other I heard him say in his Wolfman Jack voice, "They say that real people do the real thing." And with the clanging sound of the catch on that car door, he was gone.

Blaise Allysen Kearsley is a 30-year-old writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She has written for Comfusion Review and Nerve. She is the woman behind the Bazima Chronicles, a true-to-life personal website about sex and relationships in the city which has won several awards and was recently written up in the New York Press's Best of Manhattan 2002 issue.