Over the past years of observations and interactions connected to the homeless of Oregon, many have become indelible:
The man living in a culvert stuffed with a beaver dam.
The Johnny Cash impersonator living in a driftwood fort.
The roadside memorial and piece of owl-themed art for Joe, killed by a hit run driver.
The pallet and plywood shanty with a dumbwaiter.
The meth-fueled football game in the side yard of a Mormon church.
The donated coconuts.
The trampoline.
The smoke signals setup at a riverside encampment used to request paid sexual favors from a nearby sex worker.
The bedraggled and bearded man camped out in the Newport Fisherman's Memorial who quoted me lines from a Richard Hugo poem at dawn.
The man who used his homemade boomerang to kill rabbits he fried up for supper.
Seeing Mark reading my novel The Great Birthright, in front of can/bottle recycling machine.
An elderly homeless man walking across the Yaquina Bay Bridge wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase with a freshly caught crab sticking out from the edges.
And so on...
Another indelible moment just occurred. I was entering the grocery store and a homeless man surrounded by bags of cans and bottles, a bicycle, possessions, had what I thought was his phone charging into an outlet. Okay, nothing new there; I'd seen the same young man doing exactly the same thing for the past month every time I visited the store in the morning. He was always turned at profile so I never got a look at his face. He just held the phone up near his face as it charged, which was odd, but so be it.
Still, I wanted a closer look so I angled toward him. Why not? I had absolutely nothing else to do.
The man was not charging his phone. He was powering an electric razor and grooming his beard with his left hand and using his phone as a mirror in his right. On one side of him were flowers. The other side, propane tanks.
I got a better look at his face. Young, maybe in his 20s. And his beard looked great, a lot better than mine.