Compassion meets naivetÈ at the beggar's outstretched hand. Somewhere between guilt and gullibility, the average guy fishes a quarter from the pocket of his suit pants and drops it into the paper cup.

"What do you dream about?" I ask Ivan Ball.

"Dream?"

"What do you want for yourself?"

It's noon on Tuesday, and snowing. Ivan Ball, 52, extends a paper coffee cup from his red, chapped left hand. He's standing downtown on Fourth Street, at the Postal Place crossing between Walnut and Vine. Panhandling. Shivering.

"I dream I have an apartment and a job," he said.

Until a year ago, he had an apartment in a building on Warsaw Avenue. The cops kept raiding the place for drugs. Then, they closed it for good. This is what Ivan says. Then he was on the street.

"You have a change of clothes?"

Ivan is wearing a white coat over a plaid shirt over a gray T-shirt over a ribbed, white thermal top. It's what he has. Every month or so, he visits the Drop Inn Center. They give him what they've got: Thermal underwear, a shirt or two, sometimes gloves.

Ivan says he sleeps "in a churchyard across from city hall."

"How do you stay warm?"

"Best I can," he says.

Years ago, Ivan worked on the assembly line at the old GM plant in Norwood. His bosses sent him to a psychiatrist when they noticed him behaving strangely. The shrink said Ivan was schizophrenic and told him he couldn't work.

The doctor prescribed medication that kept Ivan's mental illness in check. Haldol. But when Ivan stopped working, he couldn't afford the Haldol. This is how it works sometimes.

His half-sister set him up in the apartment on Warsaw, but "now she don't want to have nothing to do with me," he says. His only other family is his mother. She's in a nursing home, Ivan says. So when the cops bounced Ivan from his apartment, the street became his home.

You can believe all of this, or none of it, just as you can drop a quarter into Ivan's cup or avert your eyes and hope Ivan goes away. Only, Ivan won't.

A woman presses a $1 bill into Ivan's cup. "Thank you, ma'am," he says.

"If you were me right now, and I were you, would you give me money?" I ask.

"If you needed it," Ivan says.

He smiles at the memory of his last hot meal, which he says was a year ago: Roast beef, noodles, mashed potatoes and gravy. He had a hot shower Tuesday, he says, at the downtown Y.

Ivan has applied for a disability benefit. He hopes to hear about that by Tuesday. His mail goes to the Drop Inn Center. This is what he says.

Society's flotsam moves in a never-ending stream; we don't know what to do about that. It can't happen to anyone, but it could happen to a lot of us. A lost job, a failed support system, a wrong choice and we are Ivan, looking at downtown workers who don't look back.

The city of Cincinnati wants to license panhandlers. It's a silly idea, a beggar's license, but I don't have a better one. Sometimes I give, sometimes I don't. Usually, all it comes down to is whether I have change in my pocket that I don't need for the parking meter.

I don't know what to do. All I know is, it's snowing. It's cold. Ivan is standing outside in clothes he's worn for a month. He coughs that phlegm-y cough of the street, a vile hack never-ending. His blue eyes are rheumy. Ivan says he's 52, but he looks 80.

"What are you doing for Christmas?" I want to know.

"What?"

"Christmas. What are you doing for Christmas?"

"Nothing," Ivan says.

"What about Thanksgiving?"

"Nothing, unless I go to a church for a meal."

The shelters are over capacity from now to March, the lousy economy is hurting the charities, the cynics among us look at Ivan and think, "A compassionate sucker is still a sucker. Get a job."

But we're only as good as the way we treat each other.

I drop a few bills in Ivan's cup.

"Thank you, sir," he says.

E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com