The Beatles had it right

A couple of nights ago, I sat at one of the long folding tables in the main room at here at the Bridgehouse Homeless Shelter in Lompoc, California and talked with Abuelita Cassandra over a cup of coffee. Her bunk is on the women’s side, directly across from mine. She’s older, thick waisted with a bulbous nose, but has fiery eyes and sits with sharp upright posture. She’s hard of hearing, some days more profoundly than others. Cassandra’s snow-white, upturned bouffant makes her look like a painting of one of the founding fathers. 

This abuela was born and raised in Santa Barbara. Her papa was a gardener. The family’s house, she told me, was in a good neighborhood. It was large, two stories tall, with smooth polished floors and green trim around the doors and windows. There were dogs and cats and chickens. Cassandra had her own pet, a loudmouth goat who followed her around like a puppy. The goat died when she was eight years old. Her mother never told her how, or why. It was Cassandra’s first experience with life’s impermanence.

Abuelita Cassandra lost her mother six months ago. Shortly thereafter, her husband had a fatal heart attack. Then, a few weeks later, her son succumbed to an aggressive cancer. Cassandra got the news while in the hospital with a brain aneurysm that seems determined to move around and remains, today, a pressing concern (no pun intended.)

 “I’m here,” she told me, gesturing with fingers fat as stuffed grape leafs, “because I need to be around people. People who give a damn.”

This was a revelation. It had never occurred to me that anyone would actually volunteer to stay at a homeless shelter. It’s always seemed to me to be the end of the line, the last fragile bit of a safety net before a plunge into oblivion.

“The people you meet here,” said a young man, sitting down beside us and running a hand through his imperfect mohawk, “they get it. They understand the value of home. The value of family, you know? Out there, we take that shit for granted until it’s gone. Until you’re on your own. Tell you one thing, jefe, nobody here takes home for granted.”

The people I meet in the shelter melt into family almost immediately, with the willingness and appetite of the starving. Because we are all hungry for love, all hungry for belonging, every person alive. But many of us grow complacent in our appreciation for what we’ve got. Complacency, at a homeless shelter, is not an option. Everything here in in vivid focus, both our surplus and our lack. And while there’s a lack of material things and assurance of consistency every single day, there’s a surplus of love. 

All you need is love.

Love is all you need.

That’s the only assurance we have in life; if we are open to love, if we put ourselves in love’s path and refuse to budge, we will receive it in abundant measure. 

I have never met human beings as willing to offer love and kindness and a sense of home as the homeless. 

At dinner last night, I sat at one of the tables with a young mother and father and their three kids. We were all bundled against the cold. Mom was crumbing crackers into the kids’ soup. Dessert that evening was an enormous, donated pan full of chocolate muffins in paper cups. There were three bowls of frosting—chocolate, strawberry and cream cheese—and plastic utensils for spreading. One of the little girls had dolloped her muffin with pink goo and was proceeding to use her little plastic knife to decorate her own face with the sugary fluff. I talked to her gently about table manners, and how big girls didn’t raise table knives to their face, and knives certainly didn’t go into their mouths; that was the job of spoons and forks.

“Thank you,” the dad said, watching. Then he added, with a laugh, “Bienvenido a nuestra casa. Welcome to our house.”

And in the end, the love you take

Is equal to the love you make.

Cherry-flavored gob smack in the kisser

Things move forward slowly. Things move forward. Things move. Things.

Life is a game of wack a mole. Life is also beautiful and, basically, a hug from the universe. A cherry-flavored gob smack in kisser. 

Life is scary and huge and scary in its hugeness and scary in the way it threatens to swallow you up whole and spit you out, drowned. Only with more gravity, both physically and in a poetic way, the kind that makes you heavy all over and all-over heavy. None of the lightness of being underwater. Just the gasping and flailing. And chlorine. I imagine chlorine, even in the ocean. They say you can drown in a cup of water. That’s reassuring--there's always at least that much, isn't there?

This is Lompoc, California, with head winds in both directions. Lompoc, in which every trip is uphill both ways, and even on sunny days, it’s cloudy. This is a dead town. I died and ended up here and I’m trying to be reborn here and that's quite a process. I feel as if I’ve accomplished little of significance today, and right now I don’t have the luxury of days where I, little, don't accomplish a significant amount of things of significance. Time flies by and by the time I notice, it’s already passed. Also, it crawls at a drunken slug’s pace. I do a lot of grumbling. Here and in person. I do a lot of sleeping, mostly in person, but sometimes by just not being here. I do a lot of aching. Which is an actual place. The pastor tells me aching is near Fresno. Aching is my middle name. But no, it's not. Hey, fella is my middle name. 

Benjamin is my first name. I’m the youngest son of my father’s favorite wife, this he used to brag, as a joke, in passing or at parties. Parties were passing and then passed. He was drunk at the parties, parties mostly in French and involving coq au vin, or vin au fin. And then he was sober and there weren’t any more parties, mostly just church and reading things silently or out loud, and plaid shirts and yellowing teeth and unkempt hair and the smell of old man.

And now he is dead. But I’m still the youngest son of his favorite wife, who is also dead. I wish I was dead-sure of this, both their both being dead and his favoritism of her. I’m all for favoritism, so long as I or someone I like is favorite. I don’t actually care much about the significance of my mother being his favorite wife because she was his only wife and thus winner by default, at least in the day to day once the past parties had passed. She told me on the occasion of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, you better love the person you marry because there are going to be times you don’t like them very much. 

I wish I was dead-sure my parents are both dead, which of course they are but not if you ask me at two in the morning practically every goddamned night when I dream them alive, vivid and useless. They won’t sink to the bottom. They are floaters, her especially. The Unsinkable Molly Brown, five foot two, eyes of blue. Pale blue eyes that I got from her, eyes that refuse to close and finally rest, for decency’s sakes. Aren’t you tired? Aren’t you tired of being somewhere between sixty and eight years old and doing the same old same old, night after night after night after night? I want to let you go although, apparently, no I don’t. I keep you floating, not rotting but not fresh. Fresh in my mind, but useless. 

You died in a proper manner, with an appropriate measure of pomp and circumstance (everyone dies with same amount of circumstance, appropriate or not.) I told you goodbye before you died and afterward, too. I stood in tight shoes and a necktie at your memorial and read bits of poetry with my sisters and everybody cried; I cried, too, being a part of “everybody” despite my frequent aspirations otherwise. And I held your ashes in my hands, your actual ashes in my actual hands. 

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. But then we all get up, if you're me, against all reason and sometimes against the laws of decency. Dead people should have the decency to stay fallen, and the dead in each of us living people should have the decency not to get churlish and swirl like leaves around our heads, a head wind in both directions, uphill each way. But that’s Lompoc for you. And that’s everywhere for you. And that’s dead people. And that’s living people. 

And that’s one part of the hug from the universe. And that’s one part of the cherry-flavored gob smack in the kisser.   And I guess I’ll take it.

Quaking

I’ve been to hell and back. Today I’ve been to CVS and back, an hour roundtrip in freezing weather on a county highway on a rickety bicycle that isn’t mine. I got antibiotics I needed but now I’m penniless. Physically and mentally, I’m broke as a sapling after a good windstorm but I ain’t a sapling, I’m an old oak tree and you can’t teach an old oak tree new tricks except, holy shit, yes you can. Turns out. This one is learning all sorts of things. 

When true simplicity is gained 

To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed

To turn, to turn will be our delight 

’til by turning, turning we come round right.

What I have learned (among several things, let’s pick one) is that I can bend. And turn. And, in turn, I can bend and when it’s my turn to bend, I can. Until I come round right. Or at least that’s the plan. Hopefully I’ll have learned some new tricks along the way. Like humility. Like what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Like God will provide. 

“Provide what?” I shout at the windstorm and give God the bird. And God says nothing. I wait a while, shaking my middle finger at the sky and holler like this is going to break something loose and it’s going to rain down explanation. And God still says nothing. 

But I do feel a little better. Because, after all, God and I are talking. Well, I’m talking. With my up-stretched arm, I mean. So I wait. And God doesn’t say anything. It’s damned quiet. 

And then I realize that I’m breathing. And I start to listen to my breathing, ugly and ragged. And then I realize that God is talking after all. My breathing is the word of God, kinda sorta. My breathing is the will of God, see, and that’s his funny way of talking. And that’s the whole point of all of this. I breathe therefore I am. And I bow and I bend and I shan’t be ashamed. And the bowing and bending is God talking, too. Loud.

And then, of course, I burst out crying because I’m a sap like that. Blame it on my father. He taught me to cry by example. And to hug by example. And to be an addict by example. The branch doesn’t fall far from the oak tree. 

I should add that after my dad quit drinking, he became a Quaker. To bow and to bend and shake like a leaf. Call it spiritual delirium tremens. He died of pancreatic cancer from the drinking. He got the cancer twenty years after he quit. And a decade after he became a Quaker. 

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. But sometimes it just kills us. I should also add that my father died happy, peacefully, surrounded by those who loved him. 

To turn, to turn shall be our delight

’til by turning, turning we come round right.