Things Worth Writing About...

Forgotten people...Like Bobby the man who sits in a corner of his room at the nursing home, so slumped with defeat his body has grown into the shape of a fat comma. Behind him, on his bedside table, is an 8 x 10 portrait of himself back in the days when he still had hope.  In that picture he's leaning in toward the viewer, smiling all the way up to his eyes. When I look at the man he's become, all I get is a quirked eyebrow, a short, sarcastic nod toward the young boy in the photograph and a shrug.

Or Annie, pulling herself around the nursing home in a wheelchair, muttering to herself words I can't understand and moaning softly. But when I come up behind her, slip my arms around her neck and lean in to hug her, she laughs like a delighted five-year-old. "Let's blow this popstand," I whisper. "Uh-huh, let's do that!" She says, knowing neither one of us is going anywhere.

Or Faye, Belle's former roommate. She's got six kids, all frequent visitors, all promising she'll be going home soon, then telling the social worker they just can't tell her the truth...that no one's coming, that revisions to her home aren't so it will be wheelchair friendly but more livable for the members of the family hoping to move in.  Somewhere down inside her ample soul, Faye knows this. The weight of their betrayal pulls her sideways in her chair and pins the stroke-paralyzed side of her body against the uncomfortable metal armrest.  "Hey, Baby Girl," she says. "I been lookin' for you all day. How you doin'?"

I like the losers, the disenfranchised, the hurt and angry underdogs.  Maybe because I've always felt just a little out of place and uncomfortable in my own skin.

That's why I like the Pirate who lives down the alley from me. Mad as hell at the Historical Commission, angry with the cops and college students, gentle with his five year old daughter, mouthing the obscene words he hurls so she won't hear him spouting his irate truths.

I like the crack whore and her boyfriend, the way she tries to hard to befriend my dogs, trying to reassure them when she and her man suddenly spring out into the alleyway fresh from using or whatever it is they've been doing behind the dumpster.

And I dislike the moralistic, self-righteous do-gooders who claim they're only in it for peace, harmony and justice.  I dislike them intensely.  It's easy to hide behind the shield of piety.  It's easy to preach forgiveness.  It's rolling around in the trenches and having your ass handed to you a few times that teaches life's true lessons.  But as usual, I digress...