Moving On Up

“It’s just for now, it’s not forever.”  When I was in the most pain in life I used this mantra to ease my ache.  It has always been the idea of the possible endlessness of certain miseries that sent me around the edge.  With the assurance of a very specific finiteness, or hell…even a general idea of an ending to the shit thereof! has been enough to bring on the big SIGH of relief. 

          And so it is with what I am already calling The Hamilton Years.  Perhaps late this year, perhaps early next, I am getting the hell out of this city.  To where?  To a town somewhere or other where people clean up after their dogs when they doo-doo on the sidewalks and there isn’t a beer bottle shattered under my feet every few yards.  Somewhere where there isn’t garbage strewn across nearly everyone’s front yard with so much more flying around that the homeowners don’t bother cleaning up because more will fly onto the yard the next day.

          I will go somewhere where I am not constantly stopped and asked for money for bus far/food/phone calls/whatever.  I was stopped by a man quite off his beam the other day begging for a dollar whining “I haven’t eaten all day.”  I laughed out loud because it was only ten in the morning, then I told him I hadn’t eaten all day either.  I also told him I had no money and scooted the hell away from him.  He was quite old and not well mentally, as is the case with many - too many – in this city.

          On the way home I passed a very yellow young man.  Face as yellow as a pansy it was.  Dark hair, thin, dark circles under his eyes, bright yellow face, dark coat.  Shocking to see, confused me greatly for a moment, then I realized he was extraordinarily jaundiced.  Ah.  Another drug user.  Among the countless.  Explained the thinness and black circles under the eyes that darted back and forth like he was on the lookout for hyenas instead of people.  But stunningly yellow, my god.

          It’s only February.  I will be here at least a year, but each day I say “Goodbye Hamilton.  I won’t miss ‘that’”  I feel self-conscious about this blog, about sentences like that, because there are people who love this city.  I don’t want to offend.  But at the same time I wonder that the people who love the city aren’t in very deep denial.  God, they just have to be! 

          If the governing body of this city put money into cleaning up the general filth and copious amounts of garbage everywhere instead of putting all money into new building projects that neglect all existing grounds the city might gain some Heart.  It’s Heartless because…well…it’s Headless, meaning there is no governing body with any integrity or interest in the daily lives of the average citizen.  If the city had an intelligent guiding Head with any integrity at all the masses wouldn’t be spending decade after decade in filth. 

          Garbage in, garbage out.  Ever hear that one?  Garbage all around us, garbage in our minds, garbage in our attitudes and behaviours.  An impoverished environment leads to an impoverished mind, and an impoverished mind leads to an impoverished state of the soul.  That is The Power of Place.

taking what I can

It’s the best kind of day, the kind that Seanna loved.  A blustery, tie-down-your-Piglets day that filled the world with the rushing sound of leaves in the wind.  Red and yellow leaves swirling in miniature cyclones on the street.  She copied them.  Spinning and laughing until she scattered herself across the ground with the leaves, enraptured.  A day for singing Winnie the Pooh songs everywhere we went.  Unmarred blue skies are for the unimaginative.  Give us dark skies roiling and roving about.  We want to see nature moving, every inch of it.  Together we revelled in days where nothing was still, not even a blade of grass.

But she’s been buried more than a year now, and for as long I’ve lived in the city.  The lawns, when they exist, are small patches of grass that make owning an expensive lawnmower ridiculous.  So small a patch of green the patch itself is ridiculous for existing.  Far too many are never mown at all, left to fill with garbage and weeds until so many weeds take over the grass the the greenery grows only tall enough to be unsightly, but not so tall that the property standards department issues a warning.

Sorry.  That’s really not what I started to talk about.  I was intending to tell you that for all the brick and asphalt and concrete filling my sights everywhere I turn, there is one small place I can sit and enjoy a blustery day and reminisce about those times with my girl (I got sidetracked by the description of the lawns directly across the street from me.)  I can lean back in my computer chair here beside the tall second story window that nicely frames a section of sky filled with tall trees off to my left (unusual for this part of town) that are waving madly in the wind and filling my ears with that wonderful rush.  I sat here in this chair looking out at the those very tall trees for the entire year since Seanna’s death, watching those trees for all the normal signs of the changes of the seasons to show me that it was true, that life was as it was supposed to be. 

The houses in downtown Hamilton could be the source of every broken heart here.  No, I’m not kidding.  They’re so tightly jammed together that no one can see a ray of light between them, and all so tall that no one can see a tree top above them, and sitting right on the bloody sidewalk so that they can’t possibly be called a “haven” from the world at large.  Hordes of teenagers and staggering drunks and angry lovers fighting on the sidewalk less than ten feet from my front door, from my front window.  From my upstairs bedroom window in the summer mornings with my window open I can hear every single word of the conversation of my neighbour across the narrow street, for god’s sake! as he talks on his cell phone sitting on his front porch. 

Yes, the houses in Hamilton might well be breaking all our hearts and stealing our feeling of promise for any tomorrow.  The only reason I am able to enjoy the solace of those humanizing trees is simply that the typical old two story semi detached houses with the ten-twelve foot ceilings that was on the site were torn down and replaced with two separate modern one story houses.  It is a pleasure to have a direction to look in to still see some light.

www.worthworks.com , www.worthwriting.wordpress.com

the living dead

the alley behind the Tim Horton

• Taking my dog Kelly for a walk is always a bit of an adventure.  She doesn’t like to travel too far at once, just short jaunts two or three times a day, and that forces me to make a trek past places nearby that are guaranteed to be inhabited by what my mother would call “unsavoury characters”.  On a good day.  On not such a good day she’d just spit out the words “Scum!  Worthless SCUM!”  But I’m not my mother.  I would never label anyone so vilely because I know that scum can read (contrary to what one might think by looking at him/her) and scum is, by the very nature of what makes them scummish, a bitter, vengeful lot. 
• No, no.  To me they are always “the disadvantaged”…whom I am careful to assume have the physical advantage over me should it come to it.
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• That is why the dog I walk is a rottweiler, sheppard cross.  Between the two of us, Kelly and I, we might make it in and around the mecca of “the disadvantaged: the Beasley neighbourhood alive. 
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• The Beasley neighbourhood, for those of you who don’t know, is labelled by the do-gooders, nay-sayers, politicians, and statisticians all as the poorest neighbourhood in all of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, a city of over 500,000 people.  The Beasley constitutes only about five blocks long by five blocks wide, if that, but within this tiny space the sick minded prejudiced bastards who just didn’t happen to have any ice floes handy to set them all afloat on and didn’t think they’d get away with gassing them like the heartless Nazi’s they are the city planners and politicians placed every service and organization that would ensure the continuation of poverty and crime. 
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• They bound together in oh-too-close-proximity the jail that houses both young offenders and grown men doing time for crimes you do not want to hear about, a few food banks, homeless shelters, and some halfway houses for those violent offenders, registered predators, drug addicts, and hopeless alcoholics to take advantage of when the jailkeepers finish with them and they walk out the front door to become members of the immediate community.  Wanna move here???  (yes, they literally just open the door and say “bye”…they don’t send them away on a bus out of town)
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• It’s easy to spot the newly freed  as oposed to the common jail visitor.  You can tell them by their blindingly white skin from long internment, the ubiquitous duffel bag, and the unmistakeable “where the hell do I go now?” look on their faces.   They often head for the nearest prostitute across from the jail, but usually go for a coffee at the Tim Horton’s just a couple hundred yards away.  The Tim Horton’s in front of the alley.  That leads to my house.  Why, then, do I walk in that alley, you ask?  Because I might as well!  It leads to my goddamn house!    (I’m okay.  I’m okay.  I took a deep breath…)
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• Getting back to the dog walking…
• This morning Kelly and I walked the regular route we take when we go to the right, along Canon Street past Ferguson Avenue, where the homeless shelter/drop-in centre attracts many of the most unfortunate people you may ever meet in your life.  If we make it past Ferguson without any incident we’re usually smoothe sailing until we have to make our way back that way and cross our fingers again.  Kelly and I usually have to make a wide arc around either a crack deal on the sidewalk or a couple of homeless people roughing up another homeless man or woman for an unpaid drug debt.  It is so common I simply expect it, and there’s really no other route I can walk where I won’t run into the same thing, only other places would be even less populated and more unsafe for me. 
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• Amazingly, there was no drug deal and no roughing up going on either way on the walk this morning, but Kelly and I ran into a prostitute on her way home from a long, rough night.  She staggered, still half drunk and/or stoned on three-inch heels, a cigarette dangling in one hand, her face a mess of scrapes and unidentifiable wounds, lengths of her straggly hair stuck to the now dried blood on her brow and upper cheeks.  Part of my mind automatically tried to identify what made the wounds.  I didn’t want to know.  I know I don’t want to know, but I have to wonder because I’m like that.  But the marks were strange to me, and their very strangeness made them more heartbreaking for some reason. 
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• And the whores do break my heart.  All of them.  Every time.  Oh god how they aint havin’ no fun.  Oh my poor babes.  What hell.  And how they all love Kelly.  No matter how wounded or tired they are, they always stop to be kind and loving to her.  And always, always, they thank me for letting them pet her. 
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• No one else but the tired whores and the smallest children ever thank me for sharing the love of that sweet pet.  I find that infintely interesting and endearing.  I don’t believe I’ve ever met the same woman twice, as small an area as the Beasley is.  I know I’ve never forgotten these women that have stopped to ask for Kelly’s attention.  I can’t forget.  Forget them?  The more I run into them the more I feel as though I’m carrying them.  I don’t think I can put them down.  And really…I wish everyone else would stop.  We are already so poor.
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• Steph
• www.worthworks.com
• www.worthwriting.wordpress.com

   

shrouded in mystery

sometimes I feel as old as this building and just as ready to close down forever

Each time I sat down to write even the simplest post about my simple day in this past week my usual tiredness morphed into a sense of overwhelming tiresomeness; the tiresomeness of merely existing until Life returns to me.  Again and again I abandoned the computer, the camera, the page, and dragged myself reeling and dizzy with sudden exhaustion to bed regardless of the time of day or evening.  It was not truly “hiding” because I was so honestly incapacitated by the merciless fatigue that I couldn’t do anything at all.  It is just as though a blinding, disorienting fog descends and swallows up my awareness until I am no longer able to stay awake at all.

That metaphorical fog is comparative to the real phenomena that appeared on Thursday and left me with haunting impressions, absolutely unshakeable. 

On my way back to the annual library book sale, I turned up Ferguson Avenue and took a pedestrian walkway through Beasley Park which brought me past J. Edgar Davey elementary school.  It was very early in the morning and the young students would normally just be settling into their seats.  This morning they were instead walking two-by-two, silently (as silently as very young children are able), around the perimeter of the school and the school yard.  There were no placards or clues as to why, no declarations made of any sort, not a word spoken by anyone.  Just children, together, as far as the eye could see – which was not far because of the heavy mist. 

In this culture of necessary fear for our children’s safety I knew it was useless to wish I had my camera with me; no photographs would have been permitted.  Also, I did not stop to look too obviously right away because staring at children in school yard will get everyone’s panic up, but eventually I was so overcome by the sight that I stopped at the far edge of the tall fence to watch the fascinating proceedings.  After a moment I noticed that another woman had stopped to watch as well.  And old muslim woman with broad strokes of kohl around her deeply creased eyes. 

Together we watched children appear seemingly out of nowhere as they came into sight on our left through the ethereal mist, drift closer to us until we could see them smiling at each other, sometimes at us, sometimes holding each other’s hands, and we watched in equal wonder as they slowly drifted out of sight behind the smokey white veil, their final destination unknown.

It was all at once beautiful and upsetting to me.  I thought quickly to myself that I just being oversensitive and silly, but when I turned to leave I was absolutely shaken to see the aged muslim woman openly weeping.  She stood as still as the heavy mist that released and swallowed the children, her hands hanging at her sides, her watery eyes narrowed with her very own sadness, but still open and seeing, watching the children disappear behind the shroud.  There are dozens of stories that would explain her tears and no need to ask which one was hers.  I understood them all already.  Loss is loss.  Love is love.  Grief is grief.  Forever is forever.

I looked her in the eyes as I walked away nodding, and she looked me in the eyes, nodding as I walked away.  And if wonder gives you wings, then knowledge must be gravity itself.  If I didn’t have a couch and a bed to take turns resting my profoundly weary Self on throughout Thursday, I would have spent most of the day and evening on the floor.  And if I did not have a floor, I would have lain in the dirt or the grass like so many homeless people who surround me in this neighbourhood.  I don’t think they’re there because they’re lazy and stupid.  I think they’re all profoundly sick and tired because they know too much about things that hurt.

I seized many a day when I had the chance and am living on the memories now. Seize the day, people, for memories may be the food that saves you when a harsh Soul Winter arrives in June and stays until the following May.

 Stephanie Hansen www.worthworks.com, www.worthwriting.wordpress.com