Sell Fish, or Go Fish

     When I bumped into Joe, he was on his knees and waving away at passing cars.  Big grin, although most of his teeth were missing.  He looked road-weary, as if anticipating that his life ahead was about to be as beat-up as his torn cardboard sign.  "Slipped on the ice," he told me, "doing construction.  They told me I need a new hip."  He was sitting on a grassy median, the entry point for cars driving into the small shopping center, an awkward place since card couldn't really stop unless they had a passenger who could wave a few dollars out the window.  It was not the best of places for Joe to park himself, but perhaps it was indicative of another bump in the road ahead.  What would happen to him from this point?  He was now 53 and a widower for 8 years.  And in the scheme of things, he wasn't alone.  In the book The Unclaimed, sociologists Pamela Prickett & Stefan Timmermans write about the nearly 1500 cremated remains heading to the "potter" fields of Los Angeles, a number representing this year's total, ready to join the over 100,000 already tossed there.  The remains of these lives had laid unclaimed for three years, a timeline set by the city in the hope that someone would care, that someone would come forward and pay the $400 holding fee to re-claim this life.  As one worker from the county morgue told the authors about practices in his childhood home: ...in Louisiana bayou country, if you had to sell a cow to bury your mama you would.  Here in L.A. he felt: ...people were fine to leave their mamas to be cremated and dumped into a common grave by strangers...people seemed to care less and less.  As the authors write in their book: The term of choice for those sent to the potter's field is longer indigent but unclaimed, reflective of relatives' inability or unwillingness to take care of their dead...The unclaimed raise pressing existential questions: If you die and no one mourns you, did your life have meaning?  If a common grave can now be the final destination for anyone, rich or poor, what does that say about us?  What does it say about America?  The answers we found were daunting and, at times, disheartening.  The unclaimed bring today's fractured families into sharp focus.  The ironic definition of such fields was: ...the useless, pockmarked tracts of land dug up for clay since biblical times by pot makers.  And whether you are aware of it or not, virtually every major city in the U.S. has its designated potter's field...

     Some of these thoughts came as my wife and I talked about our childhood memories one evening.  For some reason, and to our surprise, neither of us could remember seeing or being in our parent's bedroom as a child.  In my case, my memory of that time period was that children simply weren't allowed in there, as if it were an unwritten rule.  But as kids, my brother and I had little interest anyway.  We had play, and school, and other things to draw our attention.  Still, I was surprised that my wife had the same blank memory of not recalling where her parents slept in their house.  Bear in mind that both of us grew up quite poor, but again as kids, that shouldn't factor into our memories.  My housing project "home" was what it was.  Our place was small but with stairs, something I remember from the days of my brother and I peeking in the closet underneath the back of those stairs and being scared of what could possibly lurk there (cockroaches, for one).  I do remember going up our stairs and turning sharply left to our room.  But did my brother and I share a bed, or did we have separate beds (no recall of that, either).  And where was our bathroom?  Certainly not in our bedroom.  In my mind, peering past that bedroom door and down the hallway has me seeing only a hazy fog as if a clip from a horror movie.  As with those dark back-of-the-stairs, nowadays I strain and strain to visualize the scene but for some reason, cannot get the mental courage for my imaginary child to step forward.  Now, with my older brother gone, as well as my parents, the realization dawns on me that so are those memories of my childhood.  So many questions both my wife and I should have asked of our parents (and in my case, my sibling), but now it is too late.  As David Giffels wrote in his book on working in the shed with his dad, now in his 80s: ...it wasn't until that winter, after half a century with him, that I learned the story of his Army Corps of Engineers battalion building a bridge across the Rhine.  How does a man get this far in life without knowing his father built a bridge across the Rhine River?

     Life is short, Giffel's friend tells him before his untimely cancer diagnosis and death.  Then Giffel's mother passes away.  Now he has only his dad, and this reflection pops up: And deep into that afternoon in the barn, as "Life is short" played and replayed --a mantra-- it began to span its own hard truth.  Mainly that death wasn't interested in teaching me anything.  It could only unlock what was already inside.  That time is not for wasting, but restlessness did not enhance it.  That old friends make best friends.  That wisdom is nothing more than a lifetime of mistakes made.  That the longer we live, the less certain we are of anything, especially our own selves.  That staring into the silence, thinking a voice will speak back to me, is really just an exercise in staring into the silence...I used to think life was best when I was only vaguely aware of the mistakes I was making, powered by the precarious confidence of a young man not knowing how much he does not know.  If not for that, I'd never have played guitar in public, not attempted a novel, not moved into a condemned house, not entered the terror of fatherhood.  My existence in the dark allowed me experiences I had no other legitimate right to.  Tumbling, blind, and reckless, we find things, including ourselves.  But as life has gone on, I've found greater and greater interest in knowing my mistakes, examining them in the light, trying to understand.  They are full of information.

     So, information.  What information do we seek, especially as we grow older?  Is it something to simply fill our curiosity, to marvel at how a plane full of people can fly so effortlessly for hours, or how early Romans could build walls in the ocean that still remain while our bridges collapse after half a century (for one, their concrete mixture was different than the Portland cement we use today); do we seek answers at how a baby's lungs can go from "breathing" water in the womb to shifting within seconds to an entirely new support system?  Or do we wonder how our lives blossom in front of us and rarely urges us look back until it is far, far behind us?  And then it is gone, or partially so.  Is that all there is, or is all of this just how it's supposed to be?  Here's one thought from an essay in The Virginia Quarterly: Literary critic Frank Kermode offered another explanation for these consistent dreams of apocalypse: The sense that an ending is looming gives order to otherwise inscrutable lives. We’re born into the middle of things, plopped into a world that’s already rushing forward and continues to rush even as our cognizance dims.  To believe that the world will soon change completely and irrevocably is to take this messy blur of time and force it into a clearer shape.  Added the author: The small sliver of the universe that our telescopes and satellites have scanned these past sixty years is the equivalent of one swimming pool of water within the world’s oceans, as one academic paper notes.  If you find no dolphins in that pool, do you conclude that dolphins don’t exist?...Perhaps our solar system has been quarantined for our own good, as some researchers suggest, so that we can develop into true social maturity without outside influence. (“It might turn out that the Great Silence is like that of a child’s nursery,” as one scientist wrote in the Royal Astronomical Society’s quarterly journal, “wherein adults speak softly, lest they disturb the infant’s extravagant and colorful time of dreaming.”) Or perhaps we’ve been deemed a danger...

     Was Joe a danger?  His unkempt appearance, both of his face and appearance, didn't help.  But I was always aware that it is often a fine line between being able to return to a comfortable home, and suddenly finding yourself facing another day without bathing, and wondering if you can ever sleep comfortably in those bushes.  Perhaps because such thoughts weigh on me,  I tend to carry a few things in my car that may help someone in the streets, items such as socks, a down-like jacket for the cold, gloves, and often times a pair of slip-on shoes (trying to get the right size is a problem).  Grabbing those first few things out of my car, I walked over to Joe who immediately extended his hand and introduced himself.  When I asked him if he needed a coat, even if it wasn't the canvas type he was wearing, he burst into a smile.  "But that coat is clean," he beamed, "and I've been needing socks. "  "Never had no gloves," he added as he eagerly tucked everything away.  Anyone bought you food, I asked (my general policy is to not give money but to always offer to treat that person to, or bring him or her a meal).  That is when Joe showed me his teeth, or lack of teeth.  "I can't chew," he told me; "last had a taco and that shell took me an hour to eat."  As we talked, he continued stuffing all of the clothes behind him, sitting on the jacket I'd just given him and hiding everything else.  "Can't have people see that I have this stuff," he said.  "I need to look indigent or they won't stop."

     His words made me think of me, and us as the everyday drive-by public, and how our we look in this world can give pause to others.  A $6,000 dress at the Oscars means little to most of us (most of those dresses are donated by the designers as a sort of free advertising), but seeing someone asking for money, someone who looks capable of working and is wearing clean clothes, makes us wonder if we're being taken advantage of.  Our judgements are quick, perhaps because the scammers of today have clouded our initial reactions.  But does anyone down on their luck truly "need" to look the part?  As Supertramp wrote in their Logical song: There are times when all the world's asleep, for such a simple man.  Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?  I know it sounds absurd.  Please tell me who I am.  But then really,  who are we to judge?  As the authors of Unclaimed wrote when telling about the number of babies born stillborn and just left at hospitals: How are we supposed to make sense of this tragedy?  When an adult dies, a piece of the past is lost.  How do we mourn a "piece of the future?"  The abandonment of a deceased infant also violates expectations of parental love and, in certain ways, the very purpose of human life.  

     In the last post I noted that Neil deGrasse Tyson compiled many of the letters he had received over the years, letters from ordinary folk of all ages, including children.  Here was one he for from a budding science enthusiast: The simple medical fact is, I'm about done...the short story is, I got cancer in so many places that I stopped listening to the doctor after the first four.  It's terminal, and it's short term.  The one thing I'm going to have to insist on is that I get no boo-hoo emails.  I consider myself a pretty lucky guy...I got a dream telescope and have seen wonders in the night sky that most others will never see for themselves.  Through all of this, the universe has given me a spiritual awakening that convinces me that life here on Earth is nothing more than a phase.  And as if all of this isn't enough of a prize, I've been blessed with a two-minute warning to make this transition as orderly and as meaningful as possible.  And, by the way, time to gain appreciation of the very many things I've been taking for granted for years...very many folks spend the last years of their lives with nothing more than trying to find something to do.  My soul is tough, and I'll see it through.  Good luck, and thanks to each and every one of you.  And don't ever underestimate your contributions.  Tyson responded with this: One good thing, among many, about the cosmos, is that it belongs to us all.  As a consequence, the more you learn,  the more ownership you're compelled to take of it.  On my deathbed, one thought I will surely have comes from the evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins.  He notes that we who die are the lucky ones.  Most people, most genetic combinations of those who could never exist, will never be born so will never have the opportunity to die.  That, and other reflections of our place in the universe, never fail to bring me intellectual enlightenment and spiritual peace when I seek them.  The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge but it's more than just what you know.  It's also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe, and its attributes are clear...the cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life, but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place.  

     In his book, American Hate, author and editor Arjun Singh Sethi interviewed "survivors" of hate which had come in many forms: racial, sexual, financial, and on and on.  As one Native American said to her interviewer: See us.  Hear us.  Make sure we are included.  Don't speak over us.  Every time another one of us connects back to the sacred hoop, we win.  As the author noted later in his concluding notes: Survivors need to know they are not alone.  When I stay down with them in their communities, many talked about feeling isolated, out of place, and forgotten.  After the cameras leave, the phone calls slow, and the letters of support stop, they find themselves struggling.  Many of the people profiled in this book expressed a strong interest in meeting one another, hearing and sharing one another's stories, and healing together.

     I walked next door to Wendy's, the fast food chain, and picked up a simple meal: a chicken wrap (flour tortilla for easier chewing), fries,  and a Fanta orange soda.  When I came back around the corner, Joe seemed genuinely happy to see me.  "Hey Mike, I didn't know you were coming back."  When I apologized for not knowing what he might like to drink he jumped in with, "I love orange soda."  I told him about the wrap and how I felt it might be easier for him to eat, but instead he just smiled and told me that he was going to start on "those fries" right away.  "I can still work, you know, " he said, "plant flowers and vegetables, that sort of thing."  His face was full of brightness, something genuine.  And in the end I think he was just happy to be recognized, that someone took the time to talk to him and listen to him.  As that Easter meme so rightly noted, "everyone needs a friend who is all ears."

      When a friend visited us a few months ago, he commented that his financial advisor (my wife and I have never had or used such an "advisor") had taken two years just to get his investments back to even; for some reason I couldn't help but reflect on the words I wrote ages ago for a song: I don't understand all the rich and the poor; some people want, some just want more.  And I don't understand how we toss away our old; worthless we say, rather have our gold.  Joe wasn't worthless by any means; in fact he seemed to have more enthusiasm than most.  But it made me think that perhaps I should have asked him what he really wanted, or needed.  I now carry a plastic bag with simple things in them: a toothbrush, a face cloth, nail clippers, a razor, a small bar of soap/shampoo, lip balm, some socks, and a pair of underwear.  It may not be everything, or perhaps it was only my personal image of what would be useful if our roles were reversed, what items I would miss after a week or so.  But all of that could be wrong; after all when I worked with helping the homeless I was reminded that when you're homeless you will carry only what you need and discard the rest.  My wife and I had somehow been very fortunate on the paths we took.  And maybe neither of us could remember everything about our upbringing, but there were no negative thoughts about our growing up.  We were allowed to enjoy childhood, rich or poor, and more importantly, never felt "unclaimed."  Perhaps by meeting Joe at this point in my life, it made me look back not at what I couldn't remember, but what I could.  And that hidden wisdom of carrying only what you need, and to discard the rest.