L'Chaim

Recovery Journal

February 19th, 2019

Last night, sometime during the wee hours, Abuelita Cassandra got up from her bunk and started to cross the darkened main hall of the homeless shelter where I stay, heading toward the women’s washroom. Midway, her legs buckled under her. What came next was liked muffled thunder or the sound of a sack of potatoes hitting the floor. Then a moan. 

Stirred by the commotion, a couple of residents helped her up into a chair where she sat, wild-eyed, no idea where she was. We remembered she had recently reported having an aneurysm. Paramedics were summoned. Cassandra was calmed and helped back toward her bunk. Halfway there, her legs gave way again and she plopped to the floor on her bottom like a toddler. She looked around with a grim expression, pajama top buttoned to the chin, white hair in disarray. Her mouth opened and shut like a trout. 

In a few minutes, the ambulance got there, sirens silenced, flashing lights left dimmed. With whispers and leaning-in, Abuelita was assisted onto a gurney and rolled out through the double doors without a goodbye. Her bunk was left undisturbed, covers thrown back, a cooking magazine folded open to a recipe, a cellophane cookie wrapper crumpled beside her pillow.

I fell back into uneasy sleep. I woke again at six when the lights were switched on. I stood and yawned and stretched and joined the line for breakfast. Today we had dented boxes of Cinnamon Life Cereal and skim milk from the food shelf. When I was young, Life Cereal was my favorite. It was sweet, the only sweetened cereal my mother would bring home from the store.

There was a touch of irony in our being served Life Cereal on a morning when life’s fragility was so front and center. 

L’Chaim - To Life, I thought, knowing in my gut Abuelita Cassandra would probably not be returning to Bridgehouse. I remembered, then, her telling me about losing her pet goat when she was a little girl, and that it was her first experience with how fleeting things can be.

I sat alone for a while. Then a tall, thick-necked, thick-bellied man sat down across the table from me with his own bowl of Life Cereal and a styrofoam cup of coffee. Levar is his name. A new arrival. Levar has more tattoos than anybody I’ve ever seen in person. The ink blends with his dark brown skin in pictures and writing that cover his scalp and face and go down his arms to each of his fingertips. On one hand, in gothic script, are a list of gangs he’s been a member of. The other hand has the names of his children. Over each eye, Levar has a thin black triangle that points inward and downward. This leaves him looking permanently, thoroughly displeased. This morning, he wore a saggy white tank top and a pair of pajama pants decorated with many brightly-colored faces of Cookie Monster. The pants were garish and wonderful and made me grin. Levar returned my smile, all but his fake eyebrow anyway, and he winked, appreciating my approval of his pajamas. I didn’t have a coffee to offer him a toast, so I gestured with a plastic spoon full of cereal, and he wordlessly returned the salute.

L’Chaim!

As the sun rose, I walked out of Bridgehouse and climbed on my borrowed bicycle for the ride across town to the morning Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on V street. There was frost on the fields and ice on the bike seat. The bike’s mechanism was slugging and didn’t want to switch out of first gear, which was fine with me, because I didn’t want to switch out of first gear either. Today, it was too cold out to hurry. Hurrying would have gotten me across town quicker, but it wasn’t worth the windchill.

The 7am AA meeting is in a 1950s storefront and seating is salvaged sofas and end chairs. It’s mostly old people who show up. Like the slow ride over, that’s okay with me, because most of the attendees aren’t just old-timers, they’re “old-timers”, meaning they have decades of sobriety and lots of pithy wisdom to dispense. At those morning meetings, I mostly just listen. Today, I managed to get a big, worn, overstuffed lounger that tipped back and made me feel like the captain of nothing in particular. I kept the vow I made to myself to leave my phone put away and really pay attention for the full hour. 

On my ride back to the shelter, the sun had warmed the air by at least ten degrees, so I took the long route and explored some of the streets of north Lompoc I’ve not yet visited. There are more open fields there, with 150-year-old farmhouses that are both stern and ornate. The railroad tracks cut through on a diagonal, thus a roundtrip from the shelter sends me jostling over them four times instead of twice.

My phone vibrated. I stopped. It was a text message from the shelter letting me know Abuelita Cassandra had suffered two major strokes.

I looked out across the rolling fields. I thought of the generations of farmers and tradespeople who have lived in this town. I thought of the old-timers in the meeting. I thought of Abuelita Cassandra, confused and distressed, sitting babylike on the floor, her mouth opening and closing. I thought of her goat bleating. I thought of the big man with his painted on scowl and funny pants. I stopped a moment and looked out at the point where pasture met sky. It was quiet for a moment, save for the Lompoc Valley wind, which whistles past day and night, night and day. 

I took a slow breath, then continued on my way.