Utah Offers Housing

You are on the park bench, bags at your feet.

A nighttime DJ voice escapes from your gentle face. You could have been in broadcasting.

Who are you talking to? To no one? To someone?

You are a father, a brother, a son.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

Perhaps you are explaining.

Perhaps reciting histories.

Bible verses. 

Poetry.

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts.”

7 a.m., too early for such lofty thoughts.  My post-run coffee is calling my name.
Is there coffee waiting for you somewhere? Was there, once? What was your life like, then?

You are on the light rail, bags at your feet.

Sleeping, hunched over on 3 seats, head buried in a coat.

Your burgundy suede Timberlands are incongruous with your sweatpants.

A gift? A purchase too dear? A remnant of former prosperity?

It’s cold outside, but in here, it is warm, as we gently and noisily rock towards the airport. Through the neighborhoods. Slicing through the drizzling rain. You sleep.

You high-five your friends as you meet down by the water. All following the unspoken, practical dress code of canvas jackets, hoodies, backpacks, and grocery bags at your feet. Fathers. Brothers. Sons.

You hold your Big Gulp with clenched hands and richocheting eyes, speaking too loudly; cookies in a ziplock, furtively eating on the bus.

Who are you? I wonder.

How did you get here?

What broke?

Can it be fixed?

Can the system be saved? Is there a solution?

We talk in the comfort of our car, driving home from Baltimore. “Utah offers housing. Because without a home, we can’t even begin to address the mental health issues and the physical health issues that are driving people into the streets."

Utah offers housing. That’s a start, we say. 

You stumble out of your house as you wave at me cheerfully.

Stumblin’ Mark, we joke.

You serenade the neighborhood with Barry Manilow and Cream and NPR.

I post your musical escapades on Facebook.

Your faithful dog shits in my yard on the daily, but when they take you to jail again, I tentatively slide into the door off your back deck to make sure that the dog can get out and that someone will feed him.

Your second-shift job stopped years ago, as I am no longer awakened by the loud conversation at 4 a.m. as you get dropped off.

The dog gets slower and slower and then disappears.

Sometimes I see you walking with your backpack down to QD and back.

You get the mail occasionally.

Once we talked for a long time about kids these days as I planted flowers in the front yard.

Your son used to come over to your house. Loud arguments, doors slam. Car races away.

The camper sat listlessly in the side yard until one day it was inhabited with your ex-wife and more dogs than windows. We called animal control. I was afraid.

The camper and inhabitants were gone the next day.

Your house has been dark for a year now. 

No lights, no noises.

I think that the landlord should do something.

I think you might still be there. Once, the door was open.

I consider calling the police, but I don’t want to waste their time. 

I heard that your brother was trying to get you on benefits.

But I haven’t heard your music in years.

Maybe you moved out? 

Your long-dead car is still in the driveway; the Big Lebowski bumper sticker starting to peel.

I saw you walking to the mailbox last month. No longer stumbling, you could barely maintain a shuffle. You looked bad, man.

I thought to myself, you might die in that house and we wouldn’t know for weeks.

Would there be a smell? Would the police come?

They think you’ve been dead for quite awhile.

We’d been under a pretty strong freeze for a few weeks, so there’s one question answered. No smell.

Who were you?

How did you get here?

What broke?

Could you have been saved?

If I’d bothered to move from pity to pathy, would I have then offered you anything more than humorous derision? Would I have bothered to learn your real name?

Where was my responsibility in all this?

Was it enough to listen for the music and wait for the smell?

Was it enough?

- Mark Donald Thompson - May 1963 - November 2019 -

Ode to Winter

Winter, you suck.

Photo by Valentin B. Kremer on Unsplash

First, you are cold. It is impossible to dress in you. Put on heavy jeans and and two shirts and a sweatshirt and heavy socks because the hallways are cold...But then the coat doesn’t fit. Take off the sweatshirt, pack it in a grocery bag along with the real shoes, put the coat back on. Add gloves and a scarf? Can’t add a hat because hat head is really not a good thing when your hair is the only thing that makes you not look dead in January. Put the boots on, even though bending over in these jeans squeezes your kidneys like a sausage and now you have to pee.

Open the door and feel your nose hairs freeze. Skate across the frozen puddle of dog pee right outside the door because he ain’t going out in that, no way. Waddle out to the car. Turn it on. Listen to the grating sound of the wipers on the icy windshield while you find the scraper. Scrape the windows (try not to scrape the car) and live with the fact that you just woke your octogenarian neighbor up and it’s still dark outside.

Because, second of all, winter, (you asshole), you are so freakin’ dark. Like, unnecessarily dark. Needlessly dark. Redundantly dark. The entire state trudges through all the months of standard time because of our collective seasonal affective disorder. We have a drinking problem and we eat far too many potatoes and I blame this all on you. Sure, some people pretend to like to ski, but they live above my pay grade. I do not do “the winter sport,” unless drinking more stouts and porters counts as sport (it really should); the Y smells like chlorinated Brussels sprouts this time of year, but I drag my bloated potato body there and hoist myself onto a treadmill and sadly, mournfully jog because it is too dark outside to brave the ice and the oncoming traffic.

Not only is the ground frozen and our hopes and dreams and hair and skin shriveled beyond rehydration, but the produce has also given up pretending. The strawberries are pale. The grapes are depressed. The apples are losing their luster. The cucumbers are barely erect. The root vegetables are beginning to look like the backs of my middle-aged hands. The oranges taunt me with their Florida glow, but there will be seeds and too much pulp mocking me if I dare to momentarily dream of vitamin C from natural sources.

Winter, you are cold and grey. You are grits with no cheese or salt. You are oatmeal with no sugar. You are porridge with no butter. You are instant mashed potatoes with no milk. You are comfort foods stripped of their comfort. You are miserable and I am miserable and I am not leaving my couch again until the sun breaks through the clouds and Daylight Saving Time rescues all of us from our ennui and pending morbid obesity.

Somebody bring me a porter. 

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

I got catcalled on my 47th birthday.

This was not your standard "walking by construction site in excellent shoes and catcalled by man in yellow hardhat" that one experiences from the ages of 12 - 38; this was a whistle ricocheting off the ice crystals of a November morning, sent out the open window of an early 2000's silver Honda Civic with a bike rack on the back, aimed toward me as I jogged up the hill at the end of my morning run, unbrushed hair straggling out under a stocking cap, mismatched socks showing under too-short running pants that kept spontaneously rolling down my perimenopausal muffin-top in 30 second intervals.

I glanced around. Was that whistle meant for me? Was it an ironic whistle, mocking the middle-aged lady shuffling up the hill? A generous whistle sent in the false belief that women like to be whistled at? A whistle sent by someone I vaguely know? (If so, why would you cat-call? Do you even know me at all?) A whistle mistakenly sent in a case of false recognition and then instantly regretted?

And, how, exactly should I feel about that whistle? There was no one else around. It was clearly meant for me. The car kept driving; it did not slow down. I did not feel particularly vulnerable. I did feel like I should be offended--yet  I was mostly amused, my self-deprecating brain inventing 27 rebuttals on the spot.

And then I started to over-analyze my self-deprecation. Was I implying that I was not worthy of a catcall? Too middle-aged? Too plus-sized? Too awkwardly-gaited? A woman beyond repair? A woman beyond (possibly ironic or mistaken) appreciation?

I am just as worthy of being degraded as any other woman out there, dammit!

This is my dilemma.

And so I have made a decision.

I am going to own this catcall, just this one time, as an act of true appreciation for how truly amazing I am. I am a work in progress, to be sure. But I am a damn fine piece of work, refusing to age gracefully, refusing to go quietly, refusing to be anything other than who I am today.

Today, I got catcalled. Today, I am 47. Today, is a pretty fine day, and today I am pretty fine.

Just Write Something

The challenge for November: Write Every Day.

Just write something. Write something meaningful.

Today, I wrote 7 things on a list and crossed 4 of them off.

I wrote an impact statement to DonorsChoose donors for funding my project.

I wrote a request to DonorsChoose asking if I could hand-deliver thank you cards to donors from students (they said no).

I wrote lesson plans for the sub for Monday and Tuesday.

I wrote 4 text messages to the kids’ grandpa, 4 text messages to a student who seemed down, 3 text messages to my mom, 2 text messages to my girl scouts co-leader, and an email to my daughter asking her why she wanted me to email her English teacher. I then wrote an email to my daughter’s English teacher, giving my daughter permission to read a book in class.

I wrote 4 responses to friends on Facebook (2 responses were snarky).

I wrote several messages on Messenger to Alicia, about surviving the day, and several more to Noel, about surviving the next election.

I wrote an email to my principal (why is it so HOT in my room? And why did the guy from Herff Jones talk to the seniors about partying, getting married as they stand before God, and their gender identity --only choices available? male or female-- all in an attempt to get their orders for graduation gowns before 8 a.m.?).

I wrote an email to my whole building asking if anyone was going over to the middle school who could deliver a package, an email to the middle school teacher (the recipient of said package), and another email to my whole building pointing out that the Powerteacher gradebook might delete full assignments with all entered grades if you tried to change anything about the assignment after it was recorded.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

I wrote an email to the parents of my English 3 students, informing them of upcoming assessments and midterm feedback.

I wrote a Creative Writing project for next week and posted it to Google Classroom.

It is 1:30 p.m. I could use some coffee.

I really want to write a blog post. Something that feels meaningful. Something that feels like my soul gets to speak up. But I’m too busy writing, it seems.