Backpack Jack

The outlet mall at Flatwoods, WV isn’t very exciting.  The stores aren’t great—Tommy Hilfiger, whose clothes I won’t buy, is the only designer with a presence.  It is a good place to look for Christmas presents for newly apartmented, college freshman nieces and gadget-addicted (I’m sorry, I mean tool and I don’t mean addicted) husbands.  Plus, there is one of those Amish Bulk Foods stores that, I don’t think, have much to do with the Amish but do have lots of wonderful, bad-for-you sorts of things like bread-and-butter pickled beets and caramel-covered marshmallows.  So, I stopped yesterday on my way home from Thanksgiving in Huntington.

 

I got out of my car and heard someone barking at the top of his lungs, “…and all you God-damned Republicans are going to get what’s coming to you, all you fat fuck Jesus-freaks with your jacked-up pick-up trucks and…” Shit, I thought.  This is going to be someone I know. 

 

And it was.  Backpack Jack, who I met the first night I worked at Bartlett House back in the late 80s and who has been wandering in and out of my life ever since.  But then again, that’s what he does.  He wanders.  He labels himself a hobo and, if there is anything noble left in the call, he embodies it.

 

It seemed a civic duty to offer Jack a ride back to Morgantown; I’m a big fan of free speech, but I also think people should be able to bring their children to public places without being confronted by someone yelling obscenities.  Jack isn’t crazy, just bored and a little too in love with the idea of himself as an outlaw.  And, he told me, he had figured he wouldn’t get a ride to Morgantown that day and thought he’d just stand there yelling until the cops offered him a free place to spend the night.  Flatwoods doesn’t have a homeless shelter, and Jack says he prefers jail—fewer rules and no one who thinks they can save you.

 

The hour-and-a-half trip was like the world’s longest panhandle.  I guess Jack’s shtick is all he has left, because he kept it up long after I’d given him the five bucks he’d asked for and made it clear he wasn’t getting any more out of me.  That makes me sad.  Jack used to be more interesting.

 

We reminisced a little about his old running gang:  Cat Eyes, Big Al, and Steve who never did get a colorful nickname.  They’re all still on the road, although Jack says Steve was married for a while and is only just now de-trailered and single again.  We talked about the winter I had to cut through the duct-tape Cat Eyes used to keep his boots on to check for frostbite, and how sad it was that Big Al had ripped off a local shop-owner who is usually kind to the homeless and, as a result, wasn’t welcome in town by anyone these days.  It was a little like running into an old friend and a little like going back to a job I was no longer suited for, but mostly it made my car smell like unwashed man and wood smoke.

 

Still, it’s nice to live in a world small enough that I know the hobos on the road; when to stop, and when to keep driving.  The alternative—to always have to keep driving—seems both lonely and wrong.  I may be done letting homeless men live in my basement, but hopefully I will never have to stop offering them rides back to town.

Miracle Fruit

 

I am a complete fool for culinary curiosities.  The are  three jars of candied olives, a bottle of truffle oil, two different kinds of black rice, and several packets of instant pho in my kitchen cabinets right now.  For a few months, my friends Kevin and Sara had to avoid coming to dinner because I kept threatening to make chicken with truffles I had bought at TJ Maxx.  (When I finally opened the jar, they were dry, gritty things and I threw them away. I’m a sucker, but a picky one.)  

But Miracle Fruit is by far the strangest and coolest thing I’ve tried in a long time.  It’s a berry that (and this is just such a strange idea) has something called miraculin in it that bonds to your taste buds and temporarily keeps you from tasting the sourness of things.  

I bought my Miracle Fruit in tablet form on Ebay.  So, yes, just to clarify–I bought strange pills from an unknown person and let one dissolve on my tongue.  If you think this is the first time I’ve ever done that, you’re clearly a stranger who has just wandered over here from someplace a little more sheltered.  But anyway…  So, I let the pill dissolve on my tongue and then waited two minutes, as instructed by the few English directions on the box.  After two minutes, I took a giant swig of cranberry juice and almost spit it out because it was so sweet!  There was no bitterness it all.  So I tried orange juice.  Same thing.  Tastes like Sunny-D.  (So, yeah, gross.)  

“Well,” I thought, because I am prone thinking these sorts of things, “so what if it can make orange juice taste like Sunny-D?  Can it make lemon juice taste good?  I bet not!”  And then I liberally squeezed the plastic lemon until I had a good mouthful of juice.  (Maybe proof that all this dissolving-tabs-from-strangers stuff has been less than a great idea.)  And it wasn’t sour at all!  It tasted like those candied lemon wedges that sat on my great-grandmother’s coffee table.  (Again, not really a taste I’d go looking for, but you get the point.)

If you know me, you are probably going to get a box of these for Christmas, and maybe a few grapefruit or kumquats.  And you won’t believe me that it works as well as it does until you squeeze juice from your own plastic lemon onto your tongue

Changed

I feel like I’ve died and gone to America.

–composer Barry Franklin

I can’t stop crying.  I have been crying for five days now.  Every time someone says something to me that includes the words “President Obama,” I well up.  Jessie Jackson, Will Smith, and Oprah Winfrey cry, and I’m snot-nosed and red-eyed right along with them.  Colin Powell cries and–defends his right to cry–and I weep.  

Intellectually, I understand why I have been so invested in the Obama campaign, but until he won, I didn’t know myself how emotionally invested I was–not in his campaign, but in a dream of America that I pretended to stop dreaming some time during the Reagan years.  Or maybe it was after the The Cosby Show was cancelled and Cops debuted.  I can’t put my finger on it.  But it died when I was young enough that dreams were dying off by the dozens, and I don’t remember taking particular notice of it then.  

Now, in its triumphant return, I begin to wonder what other dreams I put aside that, instead, I should have worked toward.  It’s a scary, brilliant moment.  I am glad to have been here for it, and I hope I am up to the things it will ask of me in the coming months and years.  

 

The Revolution Wants Candy…

 

Hope comes knocking and asking for candy...

Last night, we had three Barack Obamas at our house.  The first was the teenage girl next door.  The second was the ten year old boy from down the block.  The third was someone’s father.

There were no John McCains, no Sarah Palins, and no George Bushes.  And we’re supposed to be a red state.

I will wait with the rest of you for the results of the election.  But I have seen the results of the primary:  two children, years away from voting,  dressed up on Halloween as the black man who, according to the poles, is most likely our next President.  

These children will grow up to be people who do not say, as people my age said for a very long time, “He’s a great candidate, but I don’t think even the Democrats will elect a black man as their Presidential nominee.”  They won’t say, as people I love have said as recently as last week, “It’s a shame, but this country isn’t ready for a black president.  He can’t win.”

They will have always known a black man can be president.  

The revolution has come.    Last night, it knocked on my door, along with a gaggle of Hannah Montanas and Darth Vaders, and held out its pillowcase for candy.