On the Streets

 

  

Homeless in San Diego CA

A newspaper article on “Homeless in San Diego” wrote an article that included her. Named her Delores or Doris, something like that.  Saw her every day, going and coming to work or home.  Driving by, seeing her, wondering day after day, who she was.

Ragged woman…in dirty army fatigues, worn out fatigues.  Long ratty gray hair, wrinkled hands, couldn’t see her face but once when she shook the dirty mass back to tie up with a red bandanna.  

Her face, well, her face. Must have been beautiful sometime, beauty was still there, hidden with wrinkles, dirt, frown, lines…fine bones. Fine hands, long legs.  

Sometime maybe thirty, forty years ago, now ragged worn out. 

Doris pushed her shopping cart up Washington over to Broadway, back again. 

Watched Doris for two years maybe. Each day she stretched out skinny arms, pushed heavy cart, had sleeping bag, pieces of junk, where she slept was a mystery Sometimes could see her curled up in a corner of empty supermarket, sometimes behind garbage bin. 

Didn’t know what she ate Tried to give her money a few times she swore at me, walked away, pride maybe. 

Winter and rain, saw less and less, just glimpses of here, there under overhangs or trees.  Then, one day, the next next next, Doris wasn’t there.  Never saw her again.

Wonder what, where, when.  Doris went somewhere.

 Place of help and shelter

  

Have you seen these poor people along the roads? Have you asked why? 

Coin Jar Christmas

Why not...

When Jimmy Carter became president in 1976, many events and hardships followed.  The list is long, infuriating, and filled with needs that stuck us hard in many ways, mostly our pockets.

In those years of his presidency, inflation rose, interest rates soared, and our family needs increased.  Our baby Mary was born on New Year’s Eve in 1980, just when we felt our bank account echoed like an empty canyon. 

John worked at a property management company, collecting rents, evicting, arranging for repairs.  With the rough economy, apartments stood empty and renters did not pay.

Our income shrank. Details aren't important, but December was.  We could stretch our money only so far, and Christmas was beyond our stretching reach. Facing each other the day after Thanksgiving as we decorated our Kmart artificial tree, the question hung in the air silently.  What are we going to do?

Erin was five, Johnny was three, and Mary was one—the older two danced around the lighted tree, laughing as we were almost crying.  What are we going to do?

A coin jar was on a dresser, where we had emptied pockets of coins from pockets over the past two years.  Maybe?  In a quiet house, John dumped coins onto the kitchen table and we began counting.  Stacks of quarters were few, followed by more stacks of dimes and nickels, but the pennies were a sea across the table.

Source

Fifty two dollars and some cents.  That was all we had. Every penny.  We leaned back in our chairs and considered what we could  do.  

Indecision, Indecision

Everything hangs in a balance.

At this stage of life, moments of indecision involve banality.  Should I re-fill the printer with paper?  New ink?  Should I mend clothing on the sewing machine?  And has been for years?  Should I buy new sponges, and what kind?

Banal and easily answered, they truly are.

But back when I was seventeen, life was rampant with indecision of all sorts and most readers understand, remember those hard, unsure decisions.

I was 17, a senior in Pittsfield High School.  My family had enough money to pay bills and support a family.  My father had promised that he had an account for me when I was 13 and it would have enough money, from which I would go to college.

Then, in eleventh grade, he and Mom sat me down to tell me the money had been used for other needs.  “If you want to go to college, you will have to find the money, get a scholarship…”  Mom looked down at her clenched hands, her face stony and rigid.

After a senior year of intense work to achieve and maintain a high GPA, this happened: I was asked to write the senior class poem for the graduating class of 1969.  I remember it still, now 45 years later, as I agonized over every word:

Indecision, Indecision,

Where is the rhythm of precision?

For those who lack the sight,

To make the cut

That ends the night?

We are Ixion on the wheel

Revolving in a world unreal,

Doomed to twist and turn and weave,

In an endless world of make-believe.

Oh, send to us a man of might

To save us from this plight!

With a strong arm,

To lift up us from our chair,

And return to us the need to care.

It is said a night has a thousand eyes

And the bright day has but one.

The darkness sends weeping, cries,

And the blind men suffer

None.

The College English teacher, Mr. Robb awarded me A, rare event and, one that I so desperately required to grasp the scholarship.

Wednesday Words: Fanny

Source: alexbruda

Fanny blinked at the early morning sunlight.  Another day, just like all the others…

She would go along, doing her job, making frequent starts and stops.  And always always hearing the same clattering and chattering.  ‘This is such a plodding bore, Fanny reflected.  The weight of her servitude lay upon her, heavy as cast iron.

Fanny over-heard Harold talking with Maude as he poured his coffee.  She could barely catch the conversation without being obvious, but she did distinctly heard three very important words:  slaughter house and glue.

Desperation gripped her.

Fanny kicked down the rotten stall door and took off running at a pace she did not realize she still possessed.

As the green rolling pastures passed beneath her hooves, Fanny recalled an old stallion named Big Boy, a stud from days gone by.  ‘Big Boy, get ready!  Here I come!’

Estrus cannot be denied.

Source: just4you

Thank you, Delores, for another set of challenging words.  Please go to Under the Porch Light to find other writers who have heard the call and written some creative posts!

What Dreams May Come

“What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?”

courtesy of Bing.com

This is from Hamlet, and is one of the few lines I can remember from high school English class.  It was an enigmatic line to me then, being all of fifteen years old, and having seen little of life or death.

Now, of course, that has changed.  Life and death—those are much more real to me.  You might be expecting me to expound on death and how it surrounds us all.  Nah, I want to share dreams of life with you.

I taught first through eighth grades over a twenty year span.  I restarted my teaching career when my youngest child began second grade.  By that time, I was almost 37 years old, with a load of life experiences in my backpack that most of the younger teachers could not have had.  My first class was a fourth grade class whose teacher had to take sick-leave mid-year.  Up to the time I came, there had been 18/eighteen different substitute teachers who went and left after one day. 

It was a rough class, a broken class.  More than that, it was a group of 10-11 year old children who felt abandoned in the one safe place where they could count on being cared for and taught what they needed to know. 

Not an endorsement--but it looks good.

God knows what we all need, and He certainly knew what these children needed: someone to love them, to slug it through, to stay the course with them. 

To say that we endured and came out winners would be too light-hearted.  It was a struggle, almost mental hand-to-hand combat.  Each child had their own issues of pain, divorce, poverty, gang-pressure, and abandonment from home.  They needed—no, they absolutely were desperate for someone to hold onto and to show them the door to a better world. 

Teachers must be warriors for their students.  I was a soft mother type, who made quilts and baked brownies, who taught Sunday school and played the church piano.  But I was also a tenacious and stubborn woman, who saw into the hearts of these hurting kids.  It was a daily test for all of us, and in the end, we were drawn together.  On the last day of school, we were all teary eyed to see school end and our relationship to change. 

Months before, I had entered that classroom as their adversary, another teacher whom they thought would leave them.  My promise was that I was staying, and they were not going to be left with someone else.  I kept my promise. 

Now, I have dreams of my students, over 600 of them, in different situations with me as their teacher.  Sometimes I am driving a bus on a field trip along a crazy Bolivian mountain road.  Sometimes we are in a classroom put together in a bombed out bunker.  In other dreams, teacher friends and I are going to somewhere like Haiti to set up classes for other abandoned children. 

Dreams indeed. 

The Year I Did Not Win The Publishers' Clearing House

Recently my daughter Mary asked me to write some stories about the growing up years.  Being the youngest of three children, Mary felt like she missed out on some of the memorable events that the other two were privy to.  Okay.  I gave it some thought, and this one year stands out so clearly in my mind.

The year 1981 was an eventful year, making national and international history.  Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President of the United States.  The U.S. Embassy hostages, held for so very long in Iran, were released a few days later.  The economy was plummeting all over the world, and unemployment was higher than it had ever been.  Federal taxes were brutal.  Inflation was legendary.  We took out a second mortgage on our humble house at the standard interest rate of 16 ½ percent.  We borrowed $10,000 which was supposed to provide us with income for the entire year.

We were property managers of low-income apartments in the Mojave Desert.  Our tenants were struggling to pay their rent while living in old worn out apartments.  Evictions were common; my husband went nearly every other day to file eviction notices at the courthouse.  With rent collections down so low, my husband decided we would live on our borrowed money.  Of course, he didn’t tell the owners of the properties that we were doing this.  He felt this reflected poorly on him as a manager. 

With a new baby girl, a two-year old son, and a five-year old daughter, our expenses were already stretched beyond our financial ability to pay for them.  Each month was a balancing act and guessing game:  which bills to pay, how much to pay, and how little did we need to just squeak by on a quickly emptying checking account.

 I like to think of that year as this:  The Year I Didn’t Win Publisher’s Clearing House.

Each year that big brown envelope came in the mail, and each year I had thrown it out in the trash.  The year 1981 was different.  I held that envelope in my hands and it seemed to grow warmer by the second.  ‘Why not?’ I thought, as I tore the sealed edge.  ‘Why not indeed?’

The envelope held a bundle of letters, stickers, and more than that, promises.  “You could be the next winner of $1,000,000!”  All I had to do was to fill out the enclosed papers, decide whether to subscribe to a magazine or not, get free mystery prizes, and put all those into an envelope and return it by a certain date.  My hands literally shook as I reviewed all the offers, as I thought about ‘what if?’ that this meant.  I ignored a crying baby, a brewing fight between the other two kids, and filled that return envelope, sealing it with a loud slurp.

I forgot about it.  Life went on, with clothes shopping at Goodwill, and buying out-of-date produce.  Hamburger Helper © and chipped beef on toast were seen frequently on our table.  I occasionally cleaned those emptied apartments, finding furniture that we could use, or blankets that just needed a very thorough laundering.  Yes, life went on.

But then, the mailman came and I found another brown envelope in my porch mailbox.  “You have been selected to be among the twenty thousand people who could be the next winner of $1,000,000!”  With disbelief written on my every feature, I ripped open the envelope, and there was the letter that explained everything.  I reread it, again and again, looking for nuances of language, phrases that could be misinterpreted.  Finding none, I pulled out the rest of the package of more stickers, more offers, and mystery prizes.  I filled out the papers, declining the magazines, but staying in the contest.  I had that return envelope filled and sealed before the postman made it to the end of the street.

I didn’t forget about it, but I did push it to back of the queue, behind cleaning, laundry, bill paying, and child rearing.  As I said before, life went on.  Then the water company came and turned off the water.  We hadn’t paid our bill for the last month, $28.92.  I cried, I begged, and I promised, but the water went off anyway.  I needed to take cash down to the water company and pay the bill.  There was no way to reach my husband and scream hysterically into the phone.  We had one car, an old Ford Granada.  So I paced the floor, waiting and waiting, and told the kids NOT to flush the toilet.  They did anyway.

He came home and after listening to my ranting for about ten minutes, he said that he had some cash from rent collections, and that he would go pay the bill.  An hour later the same water employee came out and turned on the water.  He tried to look apologetic, but I knew he wasn’t.  Everyone we knew was counting out their pennies and looking forward to seeing President Reagan clean up the mess of the past decade of disastrous politics.  I made grilled cheese sandwiches (with day-old bread) and tomato soup (4 cans for a dollar) for supper.  I started speaking again to my husband around 9 p.m.

The weeks dragged by.  We went to Pic-N-Save to get shoes for the kids, and found some socks as well; they were ‘seconds’ which meant there were flaws in them.  Well, the whole year was flawed as far as I was concerned, so we bought the socks and the shoes.  Our credit card usage had never been so high, but we had no money, and a promise of money in the future gave us mental permission to use the Visa and MasterCard.  I watched for the postman with the intensity of a stalker.

And he came, with the blessed brown envelope in hand.  I met him at my mailbox and took it from his hand, along with the Visa and MasterCard bills.  With anxiety born of desperation, I ripped the envelope open.  The letter read, “You have been selected to be one of eight thousand people eligible for $1,000,000!”  I fell back onto the couch, one that had been in someone else’s apartment and had needed only minor fumigation.  The kids looked up from ‘Sesame Street ©’ and then turned back to Big Bird.  Again the promise loomed before me, and with it the security it could provide.

I followed the procedures, declined the offers, and filled the return envelope with the papers I had checked and double-checked.  I caught the mailman before he got to the house on the corner.  Hope was once again alive.  Then my husband came home as I was wrestling with the bills, trying to see how close we could come to paying them all.  He asked, in all seriousness, “Do you think we could get by with $600.00 this month?”  I looked at his sweet face pinched with worry, and put my head down on the table and started crying.

The apartment owners came home from a long cruise and met with my husband to go over the collections and bill paying.  When the owner saw that we had not taken a salary for seven months (yes, seven months), he swore and said, “Dammit, you gotta look after your family.”  He wrote a check for the back pay, and told my husband in certain terms, “Don’t ever do this again!”

My husband deposited the check and didn’t tell me until the next afternoon.   The mail had come, and I was holding the letter telling me that, regretfully, I didn’t win, but not to give up because next year could be my year.  I looked at my husband as he told me that we had gotten paid back pay.  We could pay our bills, but not all of them.  It would take years to pay off the second mortgage (at 16 ½ percent) and all the credit charges.

The envelope went into the trash, and we hugged.  Then I fixed dinner, spaghetti with meat sauce.  I used a whole pound of hamburger, at 59 cents a pound on special that week.  And, life went on.