Troubadour
Saturday. Elmer and I took the long way around the park, meandering through the recently-mowed playing fields because we had all the time in the world on a fine early morning with faded Levi skies.
I am eternally grateful to enjoy this leisure when so many Americans do not and never will.
Elmer found a baseball in the grass and we horsed around with it.
A blue heron flew overhead and I stopped to marvel at its undulating, ungainly flight.
In the distance I saw a homeless woman pulling a travois-like contraption full of cans and bottles.
I saw the old man walking around the duck pond with 20-30 ducks following him on land and water for the bread he casts about. It always makes me smile seeing him doing his Dr. Doolittle shtick at this early hour. He never misses a day. We always wave to each other. I need to meet him. He is the same old man I'd seen cutting rhododendron flowers with a Bowie knife on Memorial Day. You just know it was for someone he loved.
A large tent pitched under a canopy at the base of a cedar tree caught my eye. I saw a bicycle attached to a trailer leaning against the trunk. I also saw a white cross and a large banner resting against the tent. Homeless people riding bicycles with trailers don't typically haul a cross and a large banner with them, at least not that I'd ever observed and I do a lot of observing of such sights. I have seen them fly American flags, though. They are never hung upside down as they should be.
The sight compelled an investigation.
Elmer and I moved toward the campsite. It was orderly, no scattered possessions or garbage strewn about.
I read the banner. It advertised “Sound Mind” and something about “Overcoming the stigma of mental health issues through music.”
The tent camper was a troubadour, I think. He was on the road, gigging his gig. Did that make him homeless? I don't know. He was homeless like Jesus and the Apostles were. They were on a gig. When you're on the road and gigging you are not technically homeless.
Troubadours from medieval lore never tramped to raise awareness for mental health. It was about surviving by entertaining, something that's gone on for a millennium in human culture.
But these are awful new (old) times in America and troubadours always arise when new (and the same) awful times call for them. There is a long history of American music documenting this. Woody Guthrie. Boxcar Willie and most of the blues come to mind.
I dearly wanted to meet the troubadour, but it's not like you can knock on a tent.
A plan formulated: I would return to the tent with Elmer at a more reasonable hour later that day and see if the troubadour was gigging.
That plan never materialized. A week later the tent and canopy were collapsed on the ground, with garbage strewn about. The banner was left behind. The bicycle and trailer were gone.
I sometimes overexcite my imagination on the story of homeless in my neighborhood. I always want it to be something more than just the appearance of homelessness, squalor and sadness. It occasionally is. Not this time, apparently.