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He Could Be Me – A Reflection On Homelessness
There were only two of us in the liquor store, an older fellow who was taking his time choosing his beer, and me. I was running around, distracted as usual, grabbing what I needed for the weekend.
By the time I got to the checkout, the older guy had beat me to it.
I didn’t pay much attention at first, and then I realized he was trying to buy one can of beer, looking for change in his pocket to pay for it. It was a Faxe, a Danish beer, and I had grabbed one of those for myself too. It made me smile.
Then I noticed he was was counting out his change coin by coin, but couldn’t quite come up with enough. The lady at the checkout and I looked at each other. He was short about 25 cents. He slowly dug into one pocket again, and then another.
I could see his clothes were a bit worn and his fingers a little dirty. He might have been in his 70s or older. It was hard to tell.
I ventured to guess that this fellow was probably living on the street, or close to it, like so many people these days. On my daily walk in Oaklands, I pass a park where there are a number of tents set up around the tennis court. People in tents and other people playing pickleball. Two groups living in stark contrast.
Sometimes a tent or two comes down, only to be replaced by others. When I count them, there are usually 6 to 8 tents stuffed full of, and surrounded by everything the occupier owns.
Every now and then the police and city workers come in and surround the area with yellow tape, asking people to pack everything up and go. There’s always a lot of garbage left behind, so there’s usually a garbage truck to deal with that too.
By the next day, the tents are back again.
It’s easy to think I’m a world away from all of that because I have a place to live and don’t have to worry too much about money. Although living on a pension is an eye opener.
But a number of months ago, a member of my family had to move in with us due to a series of unfortunate events. As we adjusted to another person in the house, inflation got worse and worse and the cost of living went through the roof.
It’s not only happening in my little family. According to statistics, in the last couple of years about 60% of Baby Boomers and Generation Jones’s are having to support children or family members in one way or another because of the high cost of living. I never once imagined this for my retirement years.
What on earth happened? I’m sure there are a gazillion reasons and, as usual, it’s very complicated. But it isn’t entirely new.
My Dad wrote in his memoirs about going through the “dirty 30’s” and his family having to live on what was then called relief. Another name for welfare. My grandfather had to wake his family up in the middle of the night once so they could sneak out of the place they were living. He didn’t have enough money to pay the rent.
And many years ago when I lived in downtown Vancouver, I’d walk down Robson Street on my way to work and see a number of people sleeping under the covered doorways of the stores along my route.
In the library where I worked, a few street people would come in when we’d open the doors in the morning so they could sit inside and warm up a little. Especially in the winter, or when it rained. There were no warming centres back then.
Poverty and homelessness has always been a problem to one degree or another, but now it seems even more so. I look out my upstairs window towards downtown Victoria where I see more and more new high rises popping up. But who can afford them?
Nobody I know.
I glanced at the liquor store clerk again. “I’ll pay for it.” I said quietly to her, reaching for my wallet.
“Oh, isn’t that nice? Sir, this lady has offered to pay for your beer!”
I smiled at him and picked up my Faxe to show him. “We have the same taste!”
He looked uncomfortable, almost embarrassed, and whispered a “Thank you.”
We finished the transaction, and he left with his beer. I moved closer to the counter. “I would have gone to the back room to get him the change he needed,” the clerk said. “We have some we put aside for people who are a little short of cash.”
I nodded, understanding. “Oddly enough, I think I felt better about paying for his beer than he did,” I said.
We are, many of us, one depression, one recession, and maybe even only one paycheque away from living on the streets. I turned and watched him walking carefully through the parking lot.
He could be me.
The Christmas Candle – a tribute to our Christmas traditions
I’m pretty sure I was in Grade 1 or 2 that day my mother told me we were going to invite some of my friends over to bake gingerbread cookies for Christmas.
She’d found a recipe somewhere and thought it would be fun for us all to do some Christmas baking together. I was an only child, so the neighbourhood kids were my surrogate brothers and sisters as I was growing up. We did everything together.
We picked a day and my mother started the process of making the gingerbread dough. I remember being in the kitchen with my friends, giggling as we rolled out the dough and cut the cookies.
The really fun part was decorating them with silver balls for eyes and red and green crystals. And icing. Lots of icing. We used knives to spread it all around and toothpicks to tweak it.
I’m pretty sure we ate half of the cookies as we were decorating. We definitely licked a lot of icing.
Ever since that time, gingerbread has been a part of my Christmas, whether it’s cookies or gingerbread houses. Oh, I’ve tried other store-bought gingerbread, but nothing compares to the home made stuff. You know?
My mother was an artsy-craftsy type, so she was always creating something. One day she discovered a way to make a big square candle using a 1 liter milk container as a form, so she made a Christmas candle.
All too soon, when I wasn’t quite 15 years old, my mother died of cancer. Suddenly all of the things that she’d made with her own hands became really important to me.
I don’t know how, but I managed to keep that candle with me when I moved away from home at the age of 18. And through a half a dozen moves I made over the next few years, I hung on to it. The truth is that I’m still surprised that I managed not to lose it or forget it somewhere.
When my two daughters were little, we began the tradition of making gingerbread too. And as a way of remembering my mother and my first gingerbread baking session, I pulled out the old candle and lit it.
From then on, we lit that candle every year and put it on the table beside us as we listened to Christmas music and made our gingerbread cookies.
Eventually I realized that the candle was going to burn down completely if we kept burning it (duh), and we didn’t want that to happen! So I started putting a tea candle inside it and lit that instead. Which explains the picture you see here.
No, the candle doesn’t look like much anymore. It’s more than 50 years old! But it really means everything to my daughters and to me. Even though my girls never had the opportunity to meet their grandmother Fanny, it’s a way of having her with us every year as we do our baking. Just a simple little tradition.
There are all kinds of stories out there from people recounting their Christmas traditions, many of them quirky, funny, and almost always sentimental in some way.
Even when you’re going through the worst of times, if you can have that one little thing you do, it brings back the cozy warmth of a Christmas memory. There’s nothing like it.
So Merry Christmas. And may the memories of your Christmas traditions give you great joy and comfort this year.
IJ
A Robot That Cleans The House! Sort of.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called Never Mind Astro, I Want Rosie, all about Amazon’s new robot helper Astro.
The robot was basically meant to do a few small things around the house, including turning on lights, acting as a security guard, getting you a beer (but not wine, interestingly), and playing with the kids.
At the time I complained that what I REALLY wanted was a robot that could clean my house.
Well, last Christmas, we got one. Kind of.
Our daughter gave us a Roomba.
So here is a short diary of my experiences with our new housekeeper:
Day One
She doesn’t clean the toilet or do the dishes. She doesn’t make my bed. But she DOES vacuum the floors.
Right now I’m watching as Sara (my husband named the Roomba ‘Serenity’, but I’ve shortened it to something that *I* like) is mapping out our ground floor. The cats are petrified. But curious.
They are following Sara around the house, trying to figure out who she is and what she’s doing. Sara is merrily going about her business.
I can almost hear her wondering “What the heck is this? A cat toy? Useless! And it’s in my way!”
Oddly enough I felt like I should clean up and move a lot of things around before she even got started. But I’ve given up. It’s not my job. Is it?
She softly bumps into a chair leg, then tries again, then tries again, before finally figuring out that she’s not going to get past it. So she spins around and tries another way.
We have the advantage of all of our rooms, including our bedroom, being on the main floor, so she’s got a lot to figure out. Now she knows how I feel.
At this point, Sara is 50 minutes into her mapping and has only used up 15% of her power. Not bad.
A little later and at 53% power left, she’s finished mapping.
It’s quite amazing. When we look at the app, she has mapped the whole main floor, with each room correctly named. How did she figure that out??
The REAL question is: can she do as great a job as I can?
9 months later:
After some time with Sara, I’ve decided that she does indeed come in handy. Especially those weeks when I don’t feel like doing anything. When you have cats, you have a lot of cat hair to keep up with.
And she cleans under my bed. Even I don’t go there.
Through the app, we can command her to vacuum even when we’re not at home. I haven’t figured out how to do that myself yet.
But. I’m superior at vacuuming. What can I say? I’ve practiced using a vacuum for years. I know every nook and cranny of my house. That’s because I have a much more advanced map of it in my brain than Sara does.
I can see when I haven’t caught that one little bit of fluff that’s still lying there. I can go over an area if I’m not quite happy with it. Sara isn’t that particular. I know, because sometimes I have to clean up after her.
I don’t need to re-charge. Well, not the way Sara does, anyway. A couple of sips of coffee will do.
And I can dust the furniture. I mean, don’t the two go hand-in-hand? When Sara can figure out how to dust too, I’ll have more respect for her.
The cats are more or less bored by her now. When they hear her little motor rev up, they just move somewhere else to catnap. And she has learned to ignore their toys.
I eagerly anticipate this type of technology becoming more advanced as we get older. A sort of Rosie meets Astro meets Sara thing who can clean the bathroom and vacuum and dust and make my bed.
Oh, and cook too! Yeah, get me one of those.