It’s Only Getting Better

not just because it can’t get worse.  It can.  I don’t doubt that for one minute.

My younger brother is coming to visit from Hawaii next Wednesday.  I haven’t seen him since ’92.  He’ll stay with my mother and step-dad in their second bedroom.   Mark is helping me get my mom’s life back in order.  She had a second stroke this summer and now has full on dementia.  My step-dad is trying to be her caretaker but his dementia is accelerating with the stress of losing my mom’s companionship in the here and now.

She’s great on things of the past but has a 10-second memory span now and Dick tells me to ask my mom if she had a shower yesterday or when her last shampoo was because he doesn’t remember either.  She is 80 and he is 89, so, I guess I have alot of good years left if I take care of myself.  It feels good to be able to help them now. 

I understand and feel better about why she couldn’t deal with my homeless condition.  She shut down this Spring before my auto accident.  I was living in my car and she stopped answering the phone.  I told her not to send me money because it was only a bandaid and they needed the money to keep their own heads above the waters.  Living on a fixed income in America is a scary thing.  Dick’s pension and all their monies together are under $1200 a month.  Their apartment is cheap for SLO standards, only $750 for a two bedroom but eating, getting around on the bus and just keeping everything in life turned on add up fast.

They’re moving into a senior residence this January and looking forward to being close to shopping.  They love to shop, it was their favorite form of recreation in the day, before she was afraid to be in public on a walker.  Time flys when you’re having fun. 

Mark will be helping me sort and get their belongings down to the next level of their new lives.  They have alot of stuff.  I can relate to that. 

I’m glad that mom is still with us.  She’s now the best of what she was before.  That sounds harsh, I know, but before she had gotten to the recording that my daughters got stuck on, and still are.  “It will all be alright when you (me) stop fooling around and go out and get a job.”  They just don’t get it.

Now, mom looks at me and says sadly, “How are you?” And means it.  I think she doesn’t have the parental guilt that she should fix it with the knowledge that she couldn’t or wouldn’t.  They are the same thing.  Sometimes family just can’t reach out because they have their own lives and think you should get your own.  Strangers can have more heart because they know their help won’t be for life.  It’s just temporary.

Homelessness is temporary for many, IF someone, anyone can share temporary housing with us until circumstances change.  My temporary housing is with people who were strangers but now are my extended family.  I am co-caretaker a very kind gentleman with Alzheimer’s, I’ll call B; his wife is J.  I help her whenever she needs me.  I helped get their home organized because she just couldn’t keep up  some time ago and then they took me in. 

I love to cook and they love my cooking, I love to clean and they love that, too.  J still does the heavy stuff, vaccuming, specifically—because of my injury but I can scrub and dust like a crazy woman.  We’re a match made in heaven.  I’m needed and wanted again.  That in turn makes me want to get up everyday and get to living.  My attitude is better than in a very long time— it’s only getting better and better.

Moving on up

Sooner or later— I will move on up out of being homeless.  That is something I think about each day.  Whether that includes my living in my own home once again or not— depends on a set of variables, each very much out of my control.  The irony of my permanent disability, treatment by the non-profit I worked for and am told is technically still my employer, (who specializes in vocational opportunities for people with physical disabilities) has not been lost on me.  I wondered after my recent and hopefully last round of QME’s (Qualified Medical Examinations) if they know I’m still their employee?  I don’t think so.  Their State Fund caseworker had already told me, months before the QME that she hoped the examiner would give her a diagnosis she could accept this time.

When I was first disabled three years and two months ago, from a work-related injury—I was a newlywed of 1 year.  I had just started a new job the summer of ’06 working with people with disabilities as a job coach at Achievement House.  My first day, Judy (not her real name) called out my name when she heard my voice, “Evelyn, what are you doing here?”  She is blind from birth and with acute cerebral palsy,  wheelchair bound but,  certainly, not socially challenged.

Instead of feeling uncomfortable in my new job, my old friends made me feel like it was old home week.  I’d been their van and bus driver before my eyesight became my first physical challenge in ’05.  My AH supervisor told me repeatedly that I should not be their friend,  stating in no uncertain terms that I could not expect them to work sick make sure they would work everyday regardless of if they were sick, unless they respected me.

January of 2000, I earned my Class B-Commercial Driver license  to  drive para-transit and CCAT’s County Bus for Laidlaw Transit Company.  I did have favorite riders and they worked at Acheivement House in varying occupations, sharing with me daily about the work they were so proud of. 

My Run-About van would pick them up each morning at their group home after  7 am on my 1st shift— and on my 4th  of 6 daily shifts— would take them home—often I’d take them to SLO on Saturdays, and much later take them home after their long day of shopping to hear all about it. I saw Judy and friends, most weeks—     6 days a week.

I used to love the small town feeling of SLO…running across people I’ve known for a long time, not so much in the past three years.  I used to see people I knew when my youngest daughter was born and I was a stay-at-home daycare provider, with an infant-care license would still run into me and we’d exchange news about our now 30 something children.  People who were small business owners from Atascadero and San Luis Obispo. 

My day care was called Sunshine House, started in 1979 when I moved with her Dad from the valley to the Central Coast.  We were expecting her the summer of 1979 when I hung out my shingle in the Laguna Lake area that Spring, awaiting her delivery.  Even then, sitting at home waiting for my food service/bar-tending husband, wasn’t my style.   I did the research on getting our first home built on his VA, did the paperwork, drew the rough sketch and visited every afternoon to see how it was progressing after our funding came through.  I felt like I’d delivered two different infants that year.

We moved into our modest, custom-built home the fall of 1979, to Carmel Road in the Garden Farm area onto 4+ acres.  The trees he and I planted are full grown trees now.  

I’ve owned several homes in my life, remodeling throw away properties, was my specialty— designing and implementing the build-out was the fun part.   I don’t have the same feelings about homeownership, not the heart, or the motivation.  Maybe home ownership is a young person’s sport. 

I dream now of RV’s and traveling someday.  I know I must eventually accept semi-retirement but there are so many things I still want to accomplish before I’m unable to. 

I think my dreams of moving on up are not unlike many other people my age— people who are homeless or not.  Yes, I plan to move on up!

No easy solution

I sent some of  my family in Hawaii a link to my new blog.  My sister some months ago had offered to host me in Hawaii, IF I wanted to move there.  My children are here on the mainland and I declined.  We stay in touch weekly because she worries about me.  When we spoke recently she wondered out loud what I thought was the solution.  I had to answer, which one?

Just as their are multiple reasons why people are homeless, there will be many different solutions to end the challenge of homelessness.  There will be no easy solution.  The only thing we can do wrong at this juncture is to do nothing at all.

The challenge is not too big to solve.  There are projects on a small scale that are providing viable models for other communities across the United States.  I hope that there is somewhere a clearinghouse for these projects and new ideas, as well.

A friend’s site here at wordpress prompted me a long time ago to begin contemplating writing my own blog.  He is an inspiration to many people to not give up the challenge of homelessness. Last week his www.slohomeless.wordpress.com site featured a post about a new bill coming up for consideration that would give pet owners a deduction up to $3500 per pet.  Michael has more on this at www.slohomeless.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/h-r-3501-cash-for-barkers.

It occurred to me that IF the government passed  such a flagrant bill, it might pave the way to have some celebrity lend their name to create a humane society for humans, or what about the ACLU?  Why couldn’t partnerships of service to need be met by matching individuals with homes and needs, to those individuals with service capabilities and no home?  The homeowner could have a deduction, met by a social security award to homeless who provided services. 

There needs to be more thinking outside the many boxes that are the many faces of homelessness.

Hello world!

I woke up to a grove of willows  brushing against my car window this morning!  They were trembling.  Darn, it was going to be another cold day but I hadn’t heard the wind and it wasn’t colder. 

When I sat up and looked out there were maybe twenty tiny finches playing chase back and forth.  I love being up close and personal with nature, really close.  Now I can be, full time, whenever I want.  There is an up side to everything when you care to look.

I’ve got a date today with my sweetie.  We’ve been together now for 8 months.  I met him when I first went to live in one of the transition homes here in SLO.  I didn’t last long there though.  I couldn’t get my life together and afford to buy my bed, too.  I still visit when I pick him up.  He’s an indentured servant in America, working for a bed and food with the honored title of staff. 

I don’t think that’s legal in some countries, ours being one of them but he’s older than I am with a deep fear of going out there on his own again. The head Poobah, I’ll just call him Pooh for short knows his fear and is a human predator.  Pooh made the statement to me just once, “You can’t market!”  We were discussing my being short on my bed donation of $300, which went up to $550 the first week I moved some of my stuff in.  He thought I should get out and get a real job because clearly I was not verbally impaired. We both knew I couldn’t live on general assistance which was $335, only because I had a place to live that would feed me also.  They let me keep $35 and feel bad about it.  Like I was manipulating those Machiavellian’s.

So, two months later, when I’d received notice that my car insurance was pending and my cell phone was going, too, I gave the ranch, my notice.  I’d decided to go back to the shelter or live in my car if I could manage it somehow.  The assistance went down to $115 per month but I could keep my cell phone and insurance because my food stamp were $200 a month on the street and I figured I’d  ask my kids for a coleman stove, so, I could cook for myself again.  I love to cook!

They were very pissed off about my asserting my little snotty self and making the non-verbal suggestion that living on the street was preferable to putting up with their attitude about the lions share of my money.  Well, the word went out to the residents,  I was being evicted for non-payment. 

That made me more upset than anything since messing up my suicide.  I knew they wouldn’t have any trouble filling my bed with someone who would really use it!

They knew I was sharing Bobo’s bed, but I didn’t know they were aware of my nightly visitation.  I learned months later but they couldn’t come out and state what was  known to them, could they?  

Previously, Pooh had given me his special papal dispensation to move a part of my craft studio in, promising to connect me to retailers in Morro Bay that were professional acquaintances.  When I did call on them they wouldn’t return my calls and upon leaving my portfolio and picking it up a week later, were busy and would get back to me.  He liked my hobby stuff, alot and had made an offer through one of his sycophant managers to take it off my hands in exchange for a yet to be determined trade for rent.  No way.  I would need to be awarded the stuck on stupid award.

I had tried to commit suicide only a few months earlier and was locked up in the county’s mental spa, in a paranoid state, I assumed he’d dropped something to them about my instability.  I was and probably am.  What would that have to do with my  creativity?  No, I’m no savant.  I make stuff out of found stuff. Their loss. 

I digress.  It’s the mental thing sometimes.  I need to get this posted before Baby goes to sleep.  That’s what Bobo and I call my lap top.  I’ve promised him a lesson on operating her today.  I think he should write his own blog.  He’s a very talented human being and the man who saved my life this year.  I’ll talk to you soon.  Maybe tomorrow.