Grocery Store Encounter (Part 1)
Mark sat on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store. It was 44 degrees and windy on an early January afternoon. Rain was coming.
He was counting out his various heart medications from a plastic bag that must have contained ten prescription bottles.
It's a strange, bracing sight to see someone you know (or don''t know) counting out medications on a sidewalk. I've written about this before but it bears worth repeating: Mark is a homeless man in his late 50s with a cardiologist in the Providence system, he has a licensed social worker with Providence, he receives regular checkups and free (via Medicaid) prescription medications to treat the after effects of two heart attacks suffered some seven or eight months ago. Mark is also unable to find housing and has made several farcical (not on his end) attempts to do so and I have witnessed several of them, and documented the futility in The Old Crow Book Club.
Slumped up against a concrete wall to Mark's left, was a homeless woman anywhere between 30 and 50 years old. Mark had described her to me as his friend. A blue blanket covered everything except her head and I saw her eating Christmas candy from a snowflake-decorated gift bag. She appeared totally disconnected from the moment and could barely consume the candy. She made no sounds.
This woman has been a fixture in the neighborhood and especially in front of the neighborhood for close to a year, where she is typically tweaking on something, asleep, passed out, talking weird talk, and generally acting incompetent and insane, but never dangerous to anyone else that I'd observed.
I have never met her. I've walked by her approximately 25 times and not once has she been able to speak coherently or speak at all. Many residents of the neighborhood have expressed concern about her dire situation. Doubtless, private efforts in varying uncoordinated ways have been made to assist. The grocery store must have enacted a special policy all its own to handle her.
It seems inhuman and amoral that she is allowed to live the way she does, dying in madness and squalor in plain view, a macabre American street theater that has nothing to do with entertainment, only a front row seat to the catastrophic failures of American society and the catastrophic failures to address the crisis of homelessness.
Many high profile and highly paid advocates for the homeless say this woman would be further traumatized if something proactive, immediate and substantive was done to help her. Certainly jail isn't the answer, but there has to be a strategy that helps these obviously incapacitated people into some kind of mandatory care that provides shelter and treatment. And if they refuse? This woman has no ability to consent or refuse.
I greeted Mark and wished him a happy new year. He pulled out a water logged copy of one of my latest books, Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction. I had given it to him a couple of weeks ago as a Christmas gift.
Mark had finished the book. We proceeded to discuss certain stories. He told me the ones he really liked and said one could use more conjunctions, which didn't make any sense to me and I said so. Then we defined conjunctions and their role in writing. I guess Mark wanted longer sentences in a certain story.
He said the stories seemed autobiographical and I said he was a hundred percent right, excepting the tale of homeless veteran who finds work at a Christmas tree lot in Coos Bay and turns his life around. (He also meets Prince on the lot. Yeah, that Prince.) I also told Mark that last story of the book, a love story called “The Culvert,” was a completely true retelling of an agonizing chapter of my personal life with a special woman I dearly miss.
I've written this before but it bears worth repeating: Mark is the most astute reader of my writing that I have ever encountered. No one is even close.