Old Crow T-shirts

A sunny weekday morning had me drinking coffee on the patio. Freeloading squirrels darted around chasing welfare peanuts. Jazz played on the socialist radio station. Apples from a neighbor's tree plopped to the ground. Bees bumbled in the clover.

Black spray paint colored the fingers of my left hand. I stood over a yellow baseball t-shirt I had just painted OLD CROW BOOK CLUB with my trusty stencil set that has served me well for almost two decades.

Yes, I was making t-shirts for the homeless men and women of my neighborhood who comprised the Old Crow Book Club and loving the hell of it. I wondered: was anyone else in America making homemade, punk rock t-shirts for the homeless? Undoubtedly, someone was, somewhere, and I bet they were happy as I was doing so.

Oh, I almost forgot, there was someone living in my neighborhood already making t-shirts for homeless people!

I draw extreme inspiration knowing that individuals all across the nation (of all political stripes) are offering prodigious, unofficial (and occasionally eccentric) assistance to the homeless. It's truly one of the more astonishing untold stories of this unfolding humanitarian crisis and I wish I had means to gather more of these stories.

The t-shirts dried in the sun as I read the newspaper, listened to jazz and harangued the freeloaders.

Later that morning I would set out to deliver the t-shirts. What would members of the club think of them? They had no idea they were coming.