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.

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.

And then we were three…

The homeless guy in our basement is gone. He made a brief trip to the regional jail for an old, stupid thing and now, as far as we know, is staying with a loose group of friends, possibly out of doors. We’d asked him to move out before the incident; after two years, he was no closer to being able to live on his own than when we’d first taken him in, and it was clear to us that he needed the case management services that he could only get by living in the homeless shelter. No one was pleased with the solution, but no one–not even the guy in the basement–argued against it. If any good was going to come of his being here, it seemed likely it would have come in those first two years.

Scotti, Lucy, and I live in the house alone for the first time since our marriage. My niece lived with us for a while, and a Korean psychiatrist who was here as part of an international exchange program. For a few weeks last summer, there was a second homeless man on the back porch.

I love you, I really do, but don’t ask to stay with me while you look for a new apartment or decide if you’re going to leave your husband. I’m sorry, but the guest room is full of Scotti’s papers and, as soon as I’ve put a fresh coat of paint on the walls, the basement bedroom is going to be full of mine. I am not a person who can safely have empty rooms–I fill them up with people too easily–so we are naming each room in our house something other than “the guest room” or “the extra bedroom.” We will have Scotti’s study, and my study, and maybe even a dining room again.

Pawpaw Chutney

The man behind us has a small grove of pawpaw trees, and has given me permission to pick a few off the ground so I can gather the seeds and try to start a few trees of my own.  This will be tricky.  Pawpaws are finicky trees.  The seed will have to be kept in refridgerator for at least 90, but not more than 120, days.  Each seedling will have to start out in a pot, and we don’t have a greenhouse.  But I am set on following through with the directions provided by The Calofornia Rare Fruit Growers.

Because all I need are the seeds, I have a lot of pawpaw flesh left over.  It has a taste somewhere between a banana and a mango, so I’m trying it in a mildly hot chutney made with vinegar, cloves, star anice, tumeric, Indian chilis, and jaggery.  It seems to have come out well, although it’s still cooling.  If it is good enough, I’ll make samosas.  If not, we’ll eat it with kofta curry.  Either way, there is something a little more magical about a meal made with wild foods.

My Pet Dead Rat…

I saw it, dying, for the first time a month ago.  It had curled itself into a ball against a neighbor’s stone wall.  The dogs and I passed within inches of it, but the animals did not pay each other any mind.  The way it looked in the rain, cowered against the wall, was more o’possum than rat.  I thought then that is what it was, but I don’t remember thinking about it much at the time.  Only seeing it, thinking that it did not belong there no matter what it was, and hoping it would be gone the next time we walked this patch of sidewalk.

I saw it again a few days later; stiff and swollen with death in the little patch of grass between sidewalk and curb in front of a neighbor’s house.  This time the dogs noticed it alright, pulling hard towards the stench so they could roll around in it.  It was an effort to drag them across the street.  We walked only on the other side for a week.

Now it comes and goes, disappearing into tall grass and dead leaves for a few days and then somehow back on the sidewalk again.  I almost always notice it before the dogs get too close, although today Max was about to chomp off its head before I realized I needed to reign him in. 

I think about this rat a lot right now.  About how it must mean something, although I can’t think of what.  The dead rat has too much physicality to disappear into language.  Maybe next month, when the last of its fur is gone and it’s only bone chip and tooth, it will give itself up to metaphor.  But for now it stubbornly insists on its own right to be literal.  Real.

I know I should go and get the corpse and throw it somewhere that the dogs can’t get at it–but where?  Not in the garbage, certainly… the smell is still too strong and the garbagemen came yesterday, so it would fester for a week.  (How can so little flesh left on such dry bones still stink that way?)  Not in the garden, because it is a rat.  Had it been the possum I first took it to be, I’d have dumped it in the compost heap weeks ago. 

Poor rat.  Too much a pariah even to be fertilizer.  Too real for metaphor.

I have named him Habakkuk.

Learning to Read…

 

We were playing Hide and Seek and I was under the porch.  No one ever hid under the porch because there were spiders and roly-poly bugs and I felt very brave as I rolled myself into a little ball and crammed my body behind the cement steps.  I heard the other kids get found or make it safely back to base.  The call went out, “Olly olly ox in free!”   I had won, which never happened, and usually the other kids wouldn’t even let me play because I was only five and still, they said, pretty much a baby.  I crawled out and marched over to Home Base, triumphant.

            Jennifer, who had been It and was the oldest, coolest kid any of us knew, looked at me and shrieked, “You are covered in cat shit!”

            “In what?”  I had no idea what shit was. 

            “Cat poop.  You have cat poop all over your jeans.”  Jennifer flipped her Marsha Brady hair over her shoulder and wrinkled her nose.  “No one hides under the porch because your cats use it as a litter box, you idiot.”

            I ran crying into the house.  “Mommy, Mommy, I am covered in cat shit!”

            “What did you say, young lady?”

            “I’m covered in cat shit!”

            My mother grabbed me under the arms, holding me as far away from herself as possible, and carried me into the laundry room.  As she stripped me, she scolded, “Don’t ever say that word again.  Where in the world did you learn a word like that?”  She gave me her Scary Mom look.  “Did one of the big kids teach you that word?”

            I knew my mother didn’t like Jennifer, who was in fourth grade and wore mini-skirts and had to live with her mean old grandmother because her father was a no-good-drunken-bum-who-doesn’t-seem-to-care-about-his-children-at-all.  So I sacrificed my father, who sometimes said bad words when he was on the phone talking business and anyway she couldn’t tell me I wasn’t allowed to play with my own father any more.  “Daddy says it.”

            “Well, it’s a grown-up word and little girls shouldn’t say grown-up words.”  She tugged a clean t-shirt roughly over my head and sent me back outside. 

            The game of Hide and Seek was over and everyone was standing around a dead baby bird they had found under the big elm tree in front of Jennifer’s house, poking it with sticks.  I walked over to Jennifer and kicked her.  “You almost got me in trouble.  You didn’t tell me shit was a bad word?”

            She looked at me like I was the stupidest, littlest kid in the whole world.  “Everybody knows shit is a bad word.  If you want to say it in front of grown-ups, you have to say it Op.”

            “In what?” 

            “Op.  It’s like a code.  You spell the word instead of saying it, but you don’t say the consonants, you make their sound and add –op afterwards.”

            Jennifer then studiously set about teaching me the difference between consonants and vowels, the sounds each letter made, and the curious “tch” at the end of the word bitch. 

            My mother had positively forbidden me to learn to read because, she said, children who learned to read before first grade became bored and didn’t learn good study habits.  She read a lot of parenting books; she was really afraid of screwing us all up and being stuck with a house full of idiot children who would drive her to a nervous breakdown.  But I didn’t know I was learning to read.  I thought I was learning to cuss without getting sent to my room to wait-until-my-father-got-home.

            I memorized how to say all the best words in Op.  Sop-hop-i-top.  Fop-u-cop-kop.  Bop-i-top-cop-hop.  My favorite was the melodious a-sop-sop-hop-o-lop-e.  It sounded like jalopy, which was what my mother called my father’s little purple MGB that was only big enough for one kid at a time and was the most glamorous thing anyone in our neighborhood owned.  I practiced alone in my room at night and used my copy Richard Scarry’s The Best Word Book Ever to reverse-engineer the way letters became words became stories.  In a week, I was reading Never Tease a Weasel to myself in secret.  By the end of the summer, I had chapter books hidden under my mattress and a notebook filled with my first attempts at writing.

            I was, indeed, a bored first grader who never learned good study habits.  I sat next to Cathy Wagner, who had also taught herself to read and was also bored.  Mrs. Goheen refused to call on either of us once she realized what was up.  “Well,” she’d say if we raised our hands, “we already know you girls know the answer.  Why don’t we let the kids who are just learning to read answer this question,” and then she’d call on somebody who would just sniffle and shift around uncomfortably. 

            “A-sop-sop-hop-o-lop-e,” I would whisper to Cathy. 

“Bop-i-top-cop-hop,” she’d answer.  We’d giggle behind our Big Chief tablets and roll our eyes, already in love with the transgressive nature of language.

Dinner Times

The homeless man in our basement sneaks upstairs once he’s sure we’ve gone to bed and microwaves a half-dozen Jimmy Dean Griddlecakes Sandwiches for his dinner.  The dogs jump off the bed and scratch at the bedroom door as soon as they hear him in the kitchen and they whine until the stench of cheap microwaved sausage has faded into a sort of damp, mildewy smell and he has gone back downstairs.

Kevin said, “If he lives in your basement then he isnt’ really homeless, is he?”

I think about this for a long time; months.  He is homeless because, if he is not, then my home is also his home and not just a place for him to stay while he goes through the SSI odessy.  And if this is his home, I can never say, “Okay, you got your first SSI check, time for you to move out now.  Good luck.  Take care.”  And I need to know that some day I will be able to say that, or I will come running down the stairs one night, no longer able to take the reek of his Stouffer’s Family Sized Meatloaf that will linger until the smell of the morning coffee overpowers it.

*   *   *

For our dinner tonight, I made a sort of cheap and dirty cassoulet.  White beans in a rich duck broth with ham from Mike and Donna Eisenstat’s farm, potatoes, leeks, and carrots from Reed and Kathy Evans, herbs from my garden and the one next door, and an artisnal sherry that my father gave us last year.  We ate it with a baguette from A New Day Bakery and Bûche Noire from Firefly Farms.  There was more than enough.  I could have, probably should have, invited the homeless man in the basement to join us.  For the first year he lived here, I often did.  But the quality of mercy has grown strain’d. 

It is one thing never to take responsibility for something.  It is something entirely different to put it aside once it becomes burdensome.  I am not generous enough to invite the man in the basement to join us at the dinner table, but I am also not so stingy that I would throw him back onto the streets.  It could take another few years for his SSI to come through.  We all know this now, though none of us did when this arrangement was first conceived. Until then, we are all just trying to hold on to the moral middle ground.  We gave up trying to walk the high road a long time ago.

Deceptive Abundance

A look into my backyard shows a deceptively verdant garden.  The apple trees are covered with fruit, but this has been a terrible year for flies, and the apples are already riddled with larval tunnels.  The tomato patch, on the left side of the picture, has the tallest plants I have ever grown, but we have yet to get a single tomato out of it.  There has been too much rain.  The ground cherries, in the right bottom corner, seem to have finally won the battle against the flea beetles, but it’s been a hard fight.  Dr. Bronner’s Pure Castille Peppermint Soap really does work wonders, but I lost four plants before I found the right mixture to save them.

Only the grapes are flourishing, and we have an obscene number of them.  Both the Concord and the unidentified white grapes that came from nowhere are doing well.  There will be juice, jelly, and maybe even wine. 

But it doesn’t feel like summer without tomatoes.  Kathy Rhodes has posted a piece from her book Pink Butterbeans about the joy of tomato sandwiches on her blog, First Draft.  It’s made me mindful of how late in the season it is not to have had a single garden-fresh Stupice or Cherokee Green.  Even the Mexico Midgets, which have always been reliable producers in the best weather, are still only putting out green fruit.  Only the Amish Paste seem able to withstand the wet; there are several tomatoes on those plants that should be ripe in the next few days.  So there will be canned sauce, but that is hardly a consolation to a woman mourning big slices of sunsets.  Thanks, Kathy, for the remembrance of summer, since it seems this year there will not be much of the real thing.

Nasturtium Kimchi

I planted a huge barrel planter by the front walk full of nasturtiums this spring thinking that it would be nice if we could eat the flowers.  But, although I like their peppery flavor, I find that the texture of the flower becomes clingy when mixed in with salad, particularly after it’s dressed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So I am taking a page from Maybelle’s Mom, who has inspired me to think of everything as potential kimchi, and I’ve made a batch of her Pea Shoot Kimchi with a few substitutions.  I have substituted nasturtium flowers and leaves for the pea shoots, replaced half the ground Korean Pepper with paprika (I was afraid the pepper would completely overpower the flavor of the flowers), turnip for daikon (only because I had it on hand) and lime juice for amchur powder (so we’ll have to have bitters in our gin and tonics tonight).  Oh, and I added some toasted sesame seeds.

I have to say, this experiment has not been a huge success.  It has worked, but not so well that I’m planning to plant a bigger crop of nasturtiums next year so that I can make this more often. 

The kimchi flavor itself is wonderful, but the flavor of the flower is completely overwhelmed by the other tastes, and the bright colors did not survive the process so it’s not a particularly pretty condiment. 

So, a lovely and whimsical idea… and I’m glad I tried it… but if you come for lunch next week, you’ll more likely get the flowers as a layer in a creamcheese and pumpernickle sandwich.  That has, so far, been the only really wonderful use I’ve found for them.

ISBN 978-0-9797083-2-9

That, my lovelies, is the ISBN number for Whitefish Review Volume 2, Issue 1.  This is the first time my work has appeared in something that actually has an ISBN number–and I am decidedly tickled by it.  I am even more tickled to be in the same publication as Rick Bass, whose excellent piece “Threshold” closes the journal.  It’s a piece that rings just as true here in West Virginia as it does for the Yaak Valley in Montana.  (I am going to steal his line and for the rest of my life call ATVs “chain saws on Rollberblades.”)  Jennifer Robbin’s excellent “Digging in the Dirt” got me outside and on my knees to weed the tomatoes and the ground cherries, which I have been putting off for far too long.  And Clifford Garstang’s wonderful “The Nymph and the Woodsman” has made me think of structure in new–and liberating–ways.  Everything else is probably equally good, but I only got my copies yesterday and haven’t had time to read the other pieces.  I had to spend some time smelling the pages, breaking the spine of the one copy I’ll keep, listening to that satisfying “pop” when it’s first opened wide, signing the copies I’m going to send away to friends who have been forever misremembered in the essay itself.

Following, as this does, so closely on the heals of Worst Rejection Letter Ever, this has been a real boost.  I certainly don’t mean to imply that I think the pieces published in Fringe and Conte somehow count less–they don’t.  But there is something about the physicality of paper–and the authority of the ISBN number–that adds to the general sense of having accomplished something.