Falling from Grace

My mother knew Anatole before he became homeless, he was the cousin of a good friend of hers in her tree planting group. She first met him in Vancouver at his condo when her, her friend and a few others needed a place to stay. Anatole was a professor at the university of British Columbia.

"All of us girls had a secret crush on him, he was really good looking and quite a gentleman." She said.

"But at the time he had a girlfriend, she was beautiful and very kind." 

She'd visit him a lot and eventually become good friends with him. Soon they didn't see each other for a long time, a little over ten years, then one day she was walking uptown and saw him on the street corner. When she approached him, he didn't know who she was, she told him about herself and gave him some cash. She started seeing him nearly everyday uptown, he'd always wear an aqua colored tuxedo and carted around a shopping cart. My mother told her friend Kathy that she had seen Anatole again and asked why he couldn't remember her. It turned out Anatole suffered from schizophrenia and was diagnosed with it a few years after they met. It was more noticeable now that he had always been very eccentric and different. 

"He was always very intelligent. I'd see him in the parking lot of my work reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, two phenomenal writers." she said.

"Would he spend the money you gave him  on alcohol and drugs?" I asked.

"He did, but I've learned to reserve my judgment on the matter because I have no clue how difficult it is living on the streets, if the drinking helped I believed it was okay that he did it." 

"Where is Anatole now? I never see him around the uptown area anymore." I asked her.

"He moved to toronto and no one has seen him since, I don't know where he is or how he is but I hope he is well, he deserves better then what he ended up with. He was a really great man."