C.V.'s Birthday

The day after Christmas
I hear C.V. before I see him:
a beautiful baritone voice.

Only if you can, please!
Only if you can.

He jingles a plastic cup. He sees me.
"Hello, love. How are you?"

I have some change for him.
For the Season,

His cup has a jester ring of red and green
felt spikes with bells on the end.
It's Holiday: the cup is full of fold.

I drop a quarter in.
"How was your Christmas?"

The day before Christmas he said,
"Some asshole stole my bike."
"That's bad."
"Too cold to ride it anyway."
He laughed. "I'm almost glad to let it go."

But for Christmas, he had a wonderful time.
His former wife's children had him over.
She died some time ago.
It makes him sad
And he drank a little.

"You know," he says. "I never drink.
But I thought one wouldn't hurt."

I nod. He changes his story.
"I stood up and I was dizzy.
And the kids told me to sit down and rest.
I was drinking cranberry juice. I didn't know
anything was in it. And they just kept giving me more."

I nod again.
"But I had fun," he says.
"The only thing I feel bad about,
I wanted to take pictures of my children
and I forgot."

I nod, third time.
"You'll find another opportunity."
He nods back. "Yes I will."
He smiles at me. "New Year's Eve is my birthday."
"Well, how about that?" I smile back.
"Only if you can!" he calls. "Only if you can."

On New Year's Eve,
he has a boombox with him,
still playing Christmas music.
I slip a dollar in: "Happy Birthday."

A Meaning of Christmas: The Nativity

The Nativity is really a frightening story with a happy ending. It had to be full of tough emotion for its participants. And we usually skip those emotions and go straight to the happy ending. We forget the uncertainty in the happiness of the result.

Consider Joseph, with a pregnant wife on the back of his one donkey in the cold. They didn't have a lot of luggage--not much extra food, not enough money. Not a lot of blankets or special clothes or the tools of his carpenter trade. They're on the road. That displacement has been ordered by the Roman government, so that a census may be taken. It's a sign that things are not going to be the same--they are a conquered people and soon to be a taxed people. They have a local despot for a king, a distant administration who props that king up. Joseph is supposed to protect Mary in the large and small things--and what's large and what's small had to change perspective every other minute.

And for all Mary had an Annunciation, she had to be worried something would go wrong or she wouldn't measure up. She's on the back of a donkey. She has to go to the bathroom now, but they also have to keep going. She has no women to help her with the layette. No midwife she knows will be there to cry on during labor pains. No midwife, even a stranger, guaranteed at all. Her first child will be born among strangers and maybe even in the dirt.  There's no guarantee in the Annunciation that she'll live through labor either. It only guarantees that she is chosen and she is blessed. That leaves a lot of room for fear of the unknown. Because being chosen is not usually an experience without suffering.

The inn they found was probably a tavern. It was a gathering place for all kinds of people--reliable and unreliable. More of the unknown. If it was crowded with others like Joseph, just trying to fulfill responsibility, we don't know it. We never hear about them. At best it was full of tired and cranky people, but possibly revelers and gossips and people who needed a little reform. The innkeeper and his staff were slammed with work. The permission to use the stable for a Birth might have been a kind impulse. But that innkeeper also didn't (as far as we know) ask anyone to make room for a pregnant woman and worried father. Maybe he did ask, and nobody had compassion. Maybe they had reasons why the innkeeper should ask someone else. Maybe the innkeeper didn't have time to ask, or maybe he didn't care enough to ask. Maybe the stable was cleaner anyway.

So Mary had a baby in a stable. It was not her husband's baby, but somehow that had been resolved--through love, or faith, or need on one side or both sides. Joseph would have stabled the donkey. He would have shoveled the floor of the stall and piled up hay while she bit her lip and waited or even possibly fussed. Possibly he snapped a little, because he felt inadequate to the task. They would have been scared to death--no matter how much meaning was packed into it for them--and possibly even more afraid, given the meaning.

She lived through labor. She had a baby on straw instead of the side of a road. It was better than their worst fears, and hard to reconcile with the prospect of a large gift to the world.

They would have changed the hay. They would have listened for threat from the tavern, from Roman centurions, from the weather, from animals bigger than a woman lying on straw. Still it was a miracle. It was good.

The shepherds knew to come, but no town or tavern resident on record came. The baby was viewed and watched and exclaimed over by men with low-paying menial jobs, uncertain hygiene, rough habits. But he was loved immediately.

It is a remarkable account, you know, just for its human effort. And this particular birth, in this particular set of conditions, later changed the world and the language of the spirit. For most of us who celebrate Christmas, it is the onset of our religious beliefs. It changed our understanding of the Divine, and where that Divine is present.

But even those with a different religion, or no religion, can ponder this and perhaps see meaning in it. They can see why decency matters, why worry and care are tied, why life is precious and poverty is hard. How much we need each other and how much we must do for ourselves, the very best we can.

Infinite possibility was born in soiled straw by one scared woman with one worried man in attendance, and a host of threats, large and small, all around.  And that infinite possibility was, and is always, a miracle.

Confronting the Unknown

Sometime last week, I read Michael Lewis' The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. It rambles a little, but overall it's quite good.

I had already seen the movie last December. And while I loved Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy in that film, I found the book allowed everyone else to speak a little more. Face it, Sandra Bullock took that movie past the script and the (low-key or no-key) style of the other actors. She rocked that film into the All-American, turning it into an anthem for Christian charity, The Second Amendment, designer clothes, and enlightened self-interest, all wrapped up with a big red bow.

Michael Lewis cautions us that we don't watch and understand what happens on a football field very well. We look at quarterbacks and where the ball goes. We don't look at those who make quarterbacking possible, and thereby miss a great deal of the skill.

And then there's the personal narrative working its way through.

I think it's nothing short of miraculous that Michael Oher managed to hold onto the good he found. He had little loving care when very young or attention until Big Tony and then Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy stepped into his life. (Since Mr. Oher's main adventure starts at Briarcrest Christian school, Big Tony's role in getting him there is probably not given the scope it should have. You could say we left him holding the line, while the book ran to the goal.)

A Homeless Child
In any case, Michael Oher learned how to do for himself in the most basic sense. The way the book explains it, he could fend for himself, but had no good horizon to look forward to, no "way of being" except emotionally self-enclosed and minimally self-sufficient by our generally stated standards of wealth.

Still, he had some spark that enabled him to appreciate those whom he met--and to gain the interest of others. You could say that he led into the blind side, constantly, his whole life.   A child learned to survive. A young man who had not known sufficient love believed in emotional attachment. He held onto one commonplace and usually futile dream (to be Michael Jordan) until new dreams opened up--and he did not pass them by, but worked for them. He learned everything by memorizing, because he is intelligent, but so underserved by parents, education and social services that he was disabled and disadvantaged.

Simple Minded? Hardly.
They say the Mr. Oher feels that "The Blind Side" made him look stupid. But Michael Oher has to be emotionally and intellectually intelligent. I am willing to bet he is the most complex person in the book. This is a deeper story than we know.

He could make the leap into the utterly unfamiliar, over and over again. Now he is an accomplished man with a future--with tools as well as a character that will take him  past athletics.

And the entire world has the chance to see, a little, what the gifted ones who live behind our range of vision truly need from us. I can find a way to meet some of those, just as Big Tony and the Tuohys did, and thereby see the world more fully. I can learn to take risks into my blind side the way Michael Oher has, and therefore live more fully.

I wish him the very best. And I can't wait to read his biography, which is coming out in February of next year.

You can find out more at the Michael Oher Web site. The picture below is just the start for him.

In other notes: no, I'm not done with Lincoln, of course not. Just have Zombie Work to do. Then the meeting Tuesday night. Hagakure on Tuesday, so I'm thinking later in the week for Lincoln. And who knows what else?

Have a great day, everybody! The adventure is just beginning.

Hansel for Real

This may surprise you to hear: a lot of those wagon trains to the West lost their children. Not just to attacks, accidents, cholera, or smallpox. They left their children behind, or, the buckboard bounced a child out and nobody noticed. They had the prairie version of road hypnotism. Or driving oxen under the influence. Or exhaustion and anxiety.
--
Now that you know about my store's no-babysitting policy . . . . previous post . . .

A clerk in the children's department came to find me one evening. "I've got this kid who's been reading for hours," she told me. "Nobody comes to check on him."

"Is he causing trouble?" I ask.
"No no, he's just read a whole bunch of books," she said. "I've been watching him and sometimes he goes outside. Then he comes back in to read another book." She was totally worried. "He was here at three when I got here."

It's now nine-thirty p.m.

We go into the children's department. The clerk was really good. She'd already learned his name and so she introduced me. Rather than stand up over him, I sat down at the kid's table. He's about ten years old, a serious boy.

"So, Travis, do you know where your parents are?"
He shrugs. "No."
"Okay. What have you had to eat today?"
He shrugs again. He's not moving from the chair, I can see that. I can see he's pretty much holding onto books and his composure, and that's a lot.  I turn to the clerk.
"Get a chicken sandwich from the cafe and tell them I'll stop by there later." We don't have a lot of nutritious stuff. "What do you want to drink?"
A soda. Okay. She leaves and I turn back to Travis.

"Tell me about it."
He tells me, not in so many words, but his parents are on the lam from Florida. The whole car of family were stopped in our parking lot to sleep for awhile. Travis woke up, he went into the store because he wanted to read and not disturb anyone asleep. They took off without him.
"But I think they'll be back," he says.
I nod. "When did you notice they had left?"
He doesn't want to say. Early afternoon. Oh shit, they're not coming back.

I think about taking him home, brief fantasy, but no. All I can give him is the level.

"Travis, the store closes at eleven. There's no place for you to go after that if they don't make it back by then." I clear my throat. "I'm going to call the police. That way, your parents will be able to find you if they come back."

Neither of us say the police are the last people his parents want to talk to.

The clerk returns with the food. She agrees to watch over him a little more. My department head on duty is good, she's already got the crew rocking and rolling on clean-up. I go call the police. I pay for the sandwich. The entire cafe staff is now worried about this boy. They want to do something, do more. I kill their brief fantasy just as I squashed mine.

The police come: one male, one female. They get a description of the car, maybe even a license plate, names, circumstances. They tell Travis he has to go to juvie now. The clerk comes to get me. They need me to unlock the door.

He's leaving. I'm lost somehow. I say, "Good luck, Travis."
He doesn't know how to take it, any better than I knew how to offer it.
The police woman says, "Say thank you."  She made it right for me.
Travis says, "Thank you," right before he heads to his fate.
I lock up behind them.

Packer

I never saw this man in my life, but I always called him Packer. He would have been at home in a mule-skinning outfit, as a trapper, prospector, or other frontiersman.  Unfortunately those days were done well before 1912. Those professions were in Western Territories. Packer lived on the East Coast. I believe he died in the early years of the twenty-first century.

How do I know Packer existed?

He had one grocery cart, purloined. To the front of it was tied a plush teddy bear, splayed out like the prow on an old-fashioned ship, or, alternately, a Catharine Wheel. For one two-week period of one summer, he had eight stuffed animals hanging from the grocery cart. I particularly remember a red-and-white elephant. Always, two five-gallon buckets, one for washing and one for rinsing, sat drying in the open air. The cart was full of neatly-folded blankets and clothes, as well as found salable objects. Over this, tarps would be neatly stacked, everything roped in, if the weather was good. There was always a sense of industry and cleanliness, purpose and regimen about his camp.

Only his camp was next to a bank. Stone-throwing distance from a major city intersection.

Did he have a body? Oh, yes. I never saw it though. I would leave mass transit and head home late at night. By then he was always asleep on a neatly-made bed. The bed consisted of a groundsheet and quilts ranging from small nursery-printed dumpster treasures to government-issue felt. They covered him completely, including his head.  On rainy or snowy nights I would find him completely encased in tarps, his buckets lined up to catch rain for washing, his grocery schooner wrapped into a cube of blue plastic, and, as always, tied down.

I believed he was one of the few homeless people who might have chosen to live that way by true preference. He was too competent to blame it entirely on constitutional deficits or bad luck.

One winter morning, on my way from home to work, his camp was gone. In its place was a large soot-blackened stretch of pavement, from the front of the structure pictured above to the edge of his normal camp. The globe on the lamp-post you see was now a Janus-head shape where one side was perfectly formed and the near side melted horribly, wrongly, into a distorted icicle. It looked like the lamp had a stroke. It looked like Packer had lit a cigarette under the neat bundle of tarps and blankets and burned to death. Or perhaps he had a brazier going, and everything caught on fire.

I am not sure how my fiction ends--did Packer die by fire or live to get treatment? Did he recover, but the bank finally told him to shove on? Or did this lapse from order cause him to be ashamed, to lose his sense of home, to go away and never come back?

The cart and buckets were gone.  I never saw them elsewhere. The soot marks remained, uncleaned, for a year. The city replaced the melted glass globe on the lamp-post about two years later.

Another Constellation

We have a lot of cold dessert choices in my neighborhood.

Down the street and over from Brett's Yogurt, there is another, national franchise. It sells ice cream and doughnuts: you know the one. The lady that owns it, LaRonda, is there every day in the morning with the rush, worrying in the afternoon during the lull, then speeding through the afternoon after-school rush. She does not find good enough help to be open late at night. This is a mistake on weekends.

We also have a lot of homeless people here. One of them used to buy cases of water and ice in summer, cool them down in an ice chest, and sell them. He would carry the ice chest up and down the street, or sometimes he had a wagon. Then he disappeared.

Months later, Reginald was back. In a wheelchair. He'd been at XYZ University's Hospital, getting treatment for brain cancer. Over the intervening months, he panhandled from his wheelchair, with the tumors in his head visibly getting larger and larger, his cognition poorer and poorer. Occasionally you would see him with a quart of hand-packed ice cream, getting the full good out of it. LaRonda at the ice cream and doughnut store used to give it to him freely, whatever flavor he wanted. She is struggling. She gave that homeless entrepreneur some of the last joy he had on this earth.

PTSD on foot

Post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD is on the rise in our population, and according to the Chicago Tribune, the costs for treatment are escalating. It is a syndrome we believe we are familiar with.

Most narrowly and properly defined, however, it is not applied to flashbacks or stress or mental trouble related to a single incident. It is most properly defined as a disease coming from the stress of war, or a long-lived history of child sexual abuse.  It applies to duration as well as severity of trauma. Many of us say we have it, a little. I've said it myself. It does not compare.

I copied a lot of welcome packets.
I worked for awhile as a volunteer in the Veteran's Hospital, in one town I've lived in. I worked in the mental ward as a clerk-ette and pinch-hitting art therapist. I am not trained to be an art therapist, but they didn't have one, and I do know about art. Furthermore, I am not afraid of crazy people. It was actually fun and/or meaningful to interact with the patients on the ward.

They did not give a damn about me. I understood that. Perfectly. I got yelled at a lot for no reason other than unbounded frustration, unless it was time to go down and buy the snacks. At that point, I was not superfluous. I was the trustee of their desires and their allowances. It was the moment of maximum friendliness and minimum honesty in our relationships. I do not mean the money of course, which I counted back carefully to each and every one.

 There were some vets from World War II and some from Korea. They had a chip on their shoulder, or else an out-sized belief in their ancestry and prosperity. Very poor men would tell me their grandparents used to own the land the VA was standing on, or some such tale, all similar, and all involving riches and past success not quite their own. One ordered me to call his limo, since he was going home. That was my first day. I knew better, but I had to ask anyway. No limo, no discharge, no concierge service on the ward.

The ones I met from Vietnam have settled into homelessness. They come to the VA when the nightmares and the craziness and the bugs in their clothes get to be too much for them. They are not freeloading on the VA system--they are in distress every day. They appear when they know they cannot control themselves or their environment well enough. They are taking themselves off the street for the good of the public.

The public wants them to 'get a job'. Their job is to keep sane, keep that bundle of rags they call a bed, find a way to self-medicate the crap away for just another few hours. The VA gets them off the shit and onto legal drugs, gets them stabilized, and then out they go again.

We have done little or nothing for them. What they have chosen to try doesn't work either, but this is what they have now: a house with no walls or roof, varying degrees of salesmanship or guile, and a limited set of enjoyments, all of which are annoying to the rest of us.

And then there are the convicts and the trouble-seekers. Those come too, to a short-handed ward. They served too.

I will say we had some bright people working the ward. We had a head nurse that was tough as nails with flashes of sweetness. She was a black, stern, sometimes humorous older woman who insisted on decorating for every holiday in the calendar. We also had a low-key guy who had his head on straight and his heart in the right place. He was the go-to guy: he knew how to do the meds, how to play games, how to stay calm and not get lost in the drama. It was easy to see that the job was going to kill him eventually--too many fatty dinners at the VA commissary, too much heartbreak. We also had a stern Amazon in dreads and plastic gloves, washing, washing, washing, the lice out of the clothes. Full of good sense. She and the head nurse could have gone to Iraq and kicked serious ass just on backbone alone. Where they kicked ass was in the VA system. It took a lot of kicking. They never had a full staff in mental health. Ever.

So, the art gig. 
I went down to the V.A. art supply room. The ward is a little like prison, you have to turn in your toothbrush, no vienna sausage cans with razor-sharp lids. No plastic forks: you dump the sausages into a styrofoam bowl and they are eaten as finger food. Down in the V.A. supply room they have craft kits. My personal favorite was the log basket kit. It had one hundred to five hundred short dowel pieces to glue and nail together. Just looking at the kit you knew a. it would not work and b. if you weren't crazy when you started it, you would be by the end. It was one hundred to five hundred weapons, no good on the ward. The other favorite was the moccasin kit. you could make shoes, which might be good for a homeless man. Only it had needles. Can't have that either.

There were spirit catchers with wire (garrote) and there were plaques to make with little bonnet girls and 'have a nice day!' (glue). It was quite discouraging, because it was evident the purchasers and vendors didn't give a shit about the clientele. So I spent my own money. I got magic marker sets, pastels, grown-up art paper to stretch out the VA's faded construction paper, writing paper, envelopes, stamps,  and a couple of card games. Turns out they had cards, and even checkers, but no chess. Limited chess and limited cigarette breaks turned out to be the big down side of leaving the street to come onto the ward. These are both very important items to a full life on the street.

The World War veterans wrote letters to people in orange or purple markers. They were pleased with this project, up to and including asking for the envelope. Getting the envelope was always a sad moment--they rarely had an address to send the letter to. It still counted, because they could talk about their family and reflect on other days. I gave each of them steady encouragement for an hour or two, but it didn't change the isolation, the disconnect, the reality of no address.

The Vietnam vets played checkers, and they were damned good at it too. Their shells were tougher. They laughed. They wouldn't write a letter, but they always wanted an envelope. A few of them drew. Mostly not.

The origami was a bust, almost as bad as the log basket would have been. But everyone loved Miles Davis. 'Kind of Blue' was even worth turning off the television set.

Jazz wasn't everything.
The Iraq vet I remember best sat there, looking at the paper.
At last he asked me, what should I draw?

"Well, you can draw whatever you like." I ran through a few suggestions, "A favorite animal, or whatever you think you can draw to start. Maybe a memory," I told him. "Or even shapes. What do you want to draw?"

He drew a car with flames pouring out of the windows. He was called to talk to a therapist in the middle.

I had met the therapist a few times and thought he was the worst choice imaginable for people wrestling with war and sadness. This therapist would wave a flag over anything and would listen to nothing.  It wasn't even that he was a good American. He was a self-absorbed shit with an agenda. A cloak fits anyone--coated with stars and stripes, it might fool personnel, but never a crazy man. The only thing he had going for him was combat experience--he said--but he remains my personal embodiment of REMF.

That vet left the drawing on the table. He never came back. I still have it.

Maybe he was transferred someplace more helpful for him. Maybe he gave up and booked the hell out of Dodge. He was not tough enough for the street, though. Not any longer. But you do what you must. And that's how I'll finish.

If you are a soldier with PTSD, or depression, you should go to the VA. They can do good things for you. But if you are not satisfied, if you are not getting well, you should go further, journey harder, even into the expensive treatment.  Not getting well is one hundred times more expensive.

If you are a wife, parent, sibling of a man with PTSD, do your damndest to make the best treatment happen. The VA is prepaid, but that doesn't mean it is the answer for everyone, or a full answer for anyone. Your husband, son, brother needs you, and they might need you to pay therapy bills. Do it if you can.

When I am an old lady, using my walker to get down the sidewalk,  if I see an Iraq vet with a stolen grocery cart full of crap, I will remember. I will remember that he needed help and was given a flag, unlimited TV, an envelope he couldn't address, sardines on a styrofoam plate. That the most thought-out procedures were how to get meds and Fritos efficiently delivered. I will remember that between 1965 and 2010 they added better drugs and more subtle jingoism to the repertoire, and that wasn't enough.

Do something now to get yourself back. Ask those who--yes, don't understand it, but are in your life--to help you. Maybe it seems like panhandling, asking for assistance from people who should not be strangers. They will never understand everything, you cannot explain everything, but they can still help you. You can still save yourself.

Acceptable Instantaneous Compromise

I was late to the closing on my condo. I'd gotten lost.in the middle of my new hometown. I parked, grabbed the cat's travel box, my handbag, my briefcase and ran.

As I neared my destination, I noticed a white-haired, white-bearded homeless white man in full spate between me and the door I needed. I headed pell-mell toward him anyway. Screaming or not, he looked too involved to come after me.

As I ran closer, I could hear him. "I Am God! I Am God! I Am God!

Whoops. Religion ups the stakes, too much. I slowed down. But he'd singled me out too. He turned to me.

"I Am God!"

A million things crowded my mind, such as: Nope/I Hope Not/Blasphemy/Delusions of Grandeur/Don't Agree With a Crazy Man When He's Wrong/ Don't Disagree With a Crazy Man When He's Riled/ Don't Tell A Lie

"Well, you're certainly full of the spirit, anyway," I answered.

Wonder of wonders: he calmed down. "Yes, I am," he said. "I am full of the spirit."

Made it to the closing with the cat and all. I don't know why I was worried--I was the woman with the checkbook.

Jimmy Welty

In the middle of the city of HotWinds, inside a bookstore: portraits of famous American authors, reproduced on canvas. A tall, black, and moody homeless man used to come by almost every day. He would also cadge cigarettes from employees outside on break. Sometimes, he would scare the hell out of them. That was when he was drunk.

Most of the time, he was in the company of other homeless men, and they would all sit on the sidewalk benches, laughing and arguing and drinking beer out of discarded Styrofoam cups. He had different names, depending on who he talked to. To me, his name was Jimmy, and you had to be careful not to sit on that bench if he was coming toward it.

One night, Jimmy came screaming into the store while I was dealing with a customer service issue--i.e., an unhappy customer. He immediately barreled over to me, yelling that something was wrong, something about Grandma, and that I was a bitch. The security guard threw him out.

That customer service issue evaporated pretty damned quick. Jimmy asked the security guard if I would talk to him. So about ten minutes later, I went outside.

“Jimmy, I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

“Look.” He led me away from the door and toward the window, which did not make me happy, since the security guard couldn’t see me. He pointed.
“Every night I lie on this bench and talk to Grandma,” he told me. “When I get tired, she watches over me. But now she can’t watch over me no more.”

I looked in the shop window.  Eudora Welty’s portrait had fallen off the wall.
“See,” he pointed again. “Grandma.”

“I’ll take care of it,” I promised.

The hanging screw and wire had come out of the back of the picture. I poked a new hole in the back of the frame and screwed it up tight. I rehung Ms. Welty's portrait. Made sure it was level. And he was satisfied, for months. If he screamed at me, he apologized immediately. He’d back down.

On December 27th that year, I heard he’d killed a man in front of a downtown fast food outlet on Christmas Day. I don’t know if that’s true. I only know I never saw him again.

I asked a police officer once on our beat. But Jimmy was not his name. It is only a name constructed for me to know him by.

Eudora Welty was a white Southern author, childless and unmarried. Her stories are told by unreliable narrators. In this way, she scammed her readers into learning more about human frailty, strength, and social relations than you can even add up. She never preached. She just told stories.

How thin is the barrier between sane and insane, violence and security? Her grandson knew.

A Deal is a Deal

When I moved to HotWinds, I went to work in a downtown store that had books, and coffee, and comfy chairs. It was a homeless magnet, you may be sure.

We had several characters. One would look at art books (I don’t mean pornography) or pretty complex works of history in the café. Periodically, uncontrollable rage would spew out of his mouth, loud and obscene. At the neighboring tables, the NewsMag journalists and the luncheon crowd would suddenly stiffen, electrified.  And the café staff was always afraid.

There were five managers taking shifts in that store. Four were guys. Two of the guys were scared of this man. Two enjoyed throwing him out. I had the middle road. I thought this man had maybe Tourettes Syndrome. If not, it worked out to the same thing.

So we had a ritual. I’d get a complaint, go over to him.
“How are you doing? You seem a little upset.”
“I’m fine, I’m just fine.”
“Okay, just checking. Other people are trying to read or talk, you know. You can keep it down, right?”
He would nod and look back down at the book. He was always careful with the books.

Second time: there was always a second time. “Hey, you still seem a little upset. I don’t want you to go, but if you scare people again, you know I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

One time a mom with two grade-school children complimented me. Usually, mothers with grade-school children are angry about stuff like this. I still remember her, because it was nice.  She was calming her kids down, by handling it like that, too.

Third time: there was always a third time, too. So, out.

Social services made a difference for this man. He started showing up in clean, crisp shirts, snazzy check patterns, as good as the NewsMag guys had. His hair started to shine jet-black and clean. His eyes were brighter. Things were looking up.

He still exploded spontaneously though, but by then we knew each other pretty well. After the second visit, and the third explosion, he would close his book, square it neatly on top of the table, and leave on his own. Then he’d come back in a couple days, to learn more about Eugene delaCroix or the Napoleonic wars.

I suppose we had what you call a gentleman’s agreement.

For Marcellous Lindolph, Jr.

Nobody knows which truck which company. Everybody knows he's not supposed to sleep in the dumpster.

So we might not grieve overmuch
a man unknown, a body only,
whose death  was accidental. In life
he learned rain, wind, maybe chess,
generosity and resentment.
Perhaps his goals were all mistakes.
Surely his refuge was the wrong place.
Many men could have said the same
yet died with honors.
.
.

The Forgotten Outpost in the Outpost

Not too long after the arson, I met an elderly white woman who lived in IrishTown. She was a nun, like a Poor Clare, one of the orders dedicated to serving the poor. She invited me to tea.

“What are you doing, living in this outpost of the devil?” she chided me, as we walked to her house. “This is a place full of sin.”

She didn’t wait for an answer, just chatted about the arson, and told me about her order, and about St. Francis. She did not ask my religious affiliation. She said hello to a couple of people on the street, then switched to the evils of drugs.

Her house was not that far away, but on a tougher street. The space of the front room was, like most of the 100-year-old plus houses in RiverTown, beautifully proportioned. Like most of the old houses in RiverTown, there were few inner doors, a wood floor. The wallpaper was a faded rose, the original stuff. I could see it was stretched onto tacked linen and not the walls themselves: durable work. The only decoration left, and it was not clean anymore, the dust of ages.

She told me the house was donated to her use a long time ago.
“I let homeless people sleep in here,” she said. “God bless the poor.”

She fixed tea.  She was wearing a tan habit, a cross knotted around her waist. We stood in the kitchen—bare, uncluttered—and sipped from our mugs.  I asked her why she was alone. Shouldn’t she have a convent, or a community?

“I’m the last of my order here,” she said comfortably. “We used to have quite a few, you know, but they went on.” Went on where, I wondered. With some other poor people? New orders from the chapter house? Heaven? She did not elaborate.

“Anyway, the bishop forgot about me,” she said. “But I’m doing God’s work.”

Maybe I gave her five dollars. As soon as I write that, I think I remember she refused money, or gave me no opportunity to give it. I don’t remember for sure.

Maybe she was a volunteer nun as opposed to an official one. Maybe stuck in some private fantasy. But not a scam artist.

I would see her from time to time. She wore the same clean habit every time I saw her. She was always walking alone to somewhere, cheerfully. It always seemed odd that the bishop would forget her. Maybe she was also a ghost.

Good w/ the 'Hood: Joan of Arc meets Weenie

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I’ve already written about the park across the street a little bit—our neighborhood’s one green space. Beautiful, if you overlooked the glass-strewn dirt and the tagged building, and our bedroom windows did.

I’m walking home from somewhere. Two young girls are in the park, maybe ten or twelve, both of them just loitering, maybe looking for something to do. A man is peeing right in front of them. They’re trying to ignore this, drifting away.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I stop oh, maybe twelve feet away. “This isn’t your bathroom. You’re right next to a middle school. There are children using this park.”

He shifts around, about my height, a little shorter, burly build, smooth face. All his clothes are brown. The overcoat’s dirty but not encrusted, if you know what I mean. He’s drunk, but not all the way.

“What are you going to do about it?” He’s mean with it.

Brain in fast mode: I’m going to plant my tennis shoe right where your zipper isn’t closed.

Brain in fast mode: (ah, not very much, actually . . .)

Mouth engages: “You shouldn’t do this. You either live near here, or you don’t. If you don’t, then this isn’t your park.”

“I live two blocks down the street,” he argues back.

“Then you should have walked two more blocks before going to the bathroom,” I tell him. “Don’t do this.”

He walks off, pissed. The two girls are long gone.

This kind of encounter, where I push for some standard and win a temporary battle, occurs over and over again. I never know if the war has made a difference to anyone but me. These encounters drive me to make fragile alliances over and over again. I never know if these have made a difference either.

I do know that some place in my spine is doing the thinking: Whatever words come out of my mouth seem to work at the time. I never know what I will say in advance.