Thursday, October 25, 2012
The Value of One Vote
Today I helped one person cast one vote. When I talked to him on the phone yesterday to make arrangements, I thought he might be elderly. Unless being 8 years younger than me makes him elderly, he wasn’t. It turned out he was disabled in ways that made him sound old. He had a beautiful smooth face, twinkling eyes and a big toothy smile but he had extreme trouble stepping off a curb or getting in and out of my car. Once he got going, he could shuffle along at a good pace with his cane but getting up out of a seat had me counting down to three with him to coordinate our efforts in the slow motion lift off, at times freezing in midair on the way up.
He explained to me during our car trip from his apartment on the West side that his arm had been mauled by rottweilers and his neck snapped after being hit by a 102 year old Florida driver. It caused him to retire from his 37 year career as a male nurse, the only one in his graduating class at OSU. He had been a scrawny, effeminate, black kid who was never treated respectfully by family or friends but who never let it bother him. He just laughed it off, held his head high and led a happy, successful life. He recounted the pain he felt about losing a brother who never listened to him about his partying life style and died a horrible slow death from diabetes. His brother would call him hurtful, disrespectful names but he would give anything just to hear his brother’s voice just one more time.
This physically broken man had a resilient spirit that kept him smiling and wisecracking. He flirted with all the ladies at the voting center and when he noticed the Romney wagon in the parking lot, I held him back as he played like he was going to go over there and kick some ass. Instead he was satisfied yelling “Racist” and “KKK” through the car window. He was fiercely independent, refusing the wheelchair inside the voting center when it was offered to him but he allowed me to help him through the process. Because his address had changed since last voting, he had to apply for and use a paper ballot. I knew to let him fill out all the paperwork and ballot with some helpful direction. After taking an excruciatingly long time filling in the small dot beside Obama’s name, he asked me what all the other names were about. I explained but resisted suggesting he consider giving Obama some help by at least voting for Senator Brown. Voting for president was enough for him which was something of a relief to me when I thought about how long it would have taken him to fill out the entire ballot.
After spending two hours and driving forty miles with him, I completed the task of helping one man cast one vote for one candidate. I felt enriched by having made the acquaintance of a man who was so positive and joyful despite all the trouble in his life. It was an honor to assist him in doing something that he felt compelled to do. While one vote may not make any more difference to the night than one star in the sky, the value of it is measured in the light it shines just for you.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Best When Used By...
I am not much of a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to home maintenance. In fact, I’m generally one of those do-as-little-as-possiblers when it comes to maintaining my environment. My desk at the office is a farrago of files, messages, stray documents, bills and small clerical devices. Often, my daily approach to getting work done is working on whichever file I see first on the surface and attacking the layers like a mountain top removal excavation. Finding the calculator, correction tape applicator or the letter opener often requires vertical mining methods punctuated by expletive blasts of frustration.
At home, when I was living alone, the kitchen sink could go as long as a week before either shame, disgust or the inability to prepare a meal would motivate me to do the dishes. I rationalized that it was more efficient and economical to allow the unstable stacks to fully ripen before harvesting the entire crop. Now that there are two and half of us, including one helluva cook, the speed at which the dirty dishes, bottles, pots and pans reach critical mass accelerates to daily velocity. Floors also require regular dredging but other domestic surfaces don’t clamor as loudly for attention. If there is no immediate need to navigate through an empty space, piles of flotsam and jetsam quickly accumulate and harden into dauntingly impenetrable geologic formations, archeological time capsules filled with the fossilized daily effluent of stuff draining into my possession.
I’m a decent groundskeeper as far as mowing the grass, watering plants and chopping up branches. When it comes to unskilled labor, I’m willing to give it a go. However, if the job requires expertise in plumbing, electrical or carpentry skills, I wisely restrict myself to the level of plunging toilets, changing lightbulbs and hanging pictures. The bathroom is one area of the house into which I have boldly ventured where no incompetent should go. My efforts at fixing the flushing mechanism of the toilet by stringing thin wire around a rusty lever and trying to attach it to a floating plug were based more on desperate hope than skill and met with only fleeting success.
Caulking the tub is a recurring bit of maintenance in the lavatory that seems more suited to my talents. The Battle of the Mold in the shower is one of those grueling struggles in which I can only bring myself to engage at the point that the science project threatens to escalate into a biological weapon of mass destruction. Scrubbing the discolored tiles and grout exercises areas of my musculature and patience that don’t normally get much use. However, ripping out the spotted, rubbery ribbon of caulk and replacing it with a glistening white stream of creamy sealant is an aesthetic challenge I relish. Creating a thin uniform line out of viscous silicon requires the same steady hand-eye coordination I use when I paint my watercolors as I sculpt a delicately rounded surface between wall and tub by gliding through the cool wet lava with the tip of my finger.
As I prepared for my latest adventure in caulking, I knew that a number of home repair materials used for projects over the past decade or so lay buried in the concrete graveyard of once-useful items hoping for an after-life that is my basement. This museum of my past, filled with randomly piled relics from my life with the Girlfriend, remained virtually untouched over the years of her absence like the bedroom shrine of a child who had disappeared. I decided to sift through the timeless chaos for what I needed to do today’s job instead of shopping for it. I found an applicator gun and virgin tubes of caulk which I hoped would be filled with the stuff that would return the seal around my tub to its once-gleaming glory. I vaguely remembered that an angled cut needed to be made on the plastic nozzle. When I squeezed the trigger on the gun loaded with the circumcised tube, nothing happened. Even after poking it with a nail to puncture what I hoped was the hardened crust topping a gooey center, nothing oozed forth. I pulled the tube out and looked at the part of the label that read “Best when used by 4/08”. It hadn’t occurred to me that the fresh, pure white impregnant, never exposed to the world outside it’s cardboard chamber, would petrify into an unusable memory.
At home, when I was living alone, the kitchen sink could go as long as a week before either shame, disgust or the inability to prepare a meal would motivate me to do the dishes. I rationalized that it was more efficient and economical to allow the unstable stacks to fully ripen before harvesting the entire crop. Now that there are two and half of us, including one helluva cook, the speed at which the dirty dishes, bottles, pots and pans reach critical mass accelerates to daily velocity. Floors also require regular dredging but other domestic surfaces don’t clamor as loudly for attention. If there is no immediate need to navigate through an empty space, piles of flotsam and jetsam quickly accumulate and harden into dauntingly impenetrable geologic formations, archeological time capsules filled with the fossilized daily effluent of stuff draining into my possession.
I’m a decent groundskeeper as far as mowing the grass, watering plants and chopping up branches. When it comes to unskilled labor, I’m willing to give it a go. However, if the job requires expertise in plumbing, electrical or carpentry skills, I wisely restrict myself to the level of plunging toilets, changing lightbulbs and hanging pictures. The bathroom is one area of the house into which I have boldly ventured where no incompetent should go. My efforts at fixing the flushing mechanism of the toilet by stringing thin wire around a rusty lever and trying to attach it to a floating plug were based more on desperate hope than skill and met with only fleeting success.
Caulking the tub is a recurring bit of maintenance in the lavatory that seems more suited to my talents. The Battle of the Mold in the shower is one of those grueling struggles in which I can only bring myself to engage at the point that the science project threatens to escalate into a biological weapon of mass destruction. Scrubbing the discolored tiles and grout exercises areas of my musculature and patience that don’t normally get much use. However, ripping out the spotted, rubbery ribbon of caulk and replacing it with a glistening white stream of creamy sealant is an aesthetic challenge I relish. Creating a thin uniform line out of viscous silicon requires the same steady hand-eye coordination I use when I paint my watercolors as I sculpt a delicately rounded surface between wall and tub by gliding through the cool wet lava with the tip of my finger.
As I prepared for my latest adventure in caulking, I knew that a number of home repair materials used for projects over the past decade or so lay buried in the concrete graveyard of once-useful items hoping for an after-life that is my basement. This museum of my past, filled with randomly piled relics from my life with the Girlfriend, remained virtually untouched over the years of her absence like the bedroom shrine of a child who had disappeared. I decided to sift through the timeless chaos for what I needed to do today’s job instead of shopping for it. I found an applicator gun and virgin tubes of caulk which I hoped would be filled with the stuff that would return the seal around my tub to its once-gleaming glory. I vaguely remembered that an angled cut needed to be made on the plastic nozzle. When I squeezed the trigger on the gun loaded with the circumcised tube, nothing happened. Even after poking it with a nail to puncture what I hoped was the hardened crust topping a gooey center, nothing oozed forth. I pulled the tube out and looked at the part of the label that read “Best when used by 4/08”. It hadn’t occurred to me that the fresh, pure white impregnant, never exposed to the world outside it’s cardboard chamber, would petrify into an unusable memory.
Friday, April 6, 2012
Recycling
One of my tenants died. She rented an efficiency apartment in my vaguely odd Spanish-style stucco building incongruously located in Italian Village. She was a holdover tenant when I purchased the place and probably had lived there for 20 years. The low rent fit her disability income which frequently required relatives or a church fund to supplement. She suffered from diabetes and a respiratory ailment. Our communication was limited to her polite requests for extensions to pay, dealing with unpaid heat bills and a few maintenance issues. A couple years ago, I entered the premises for the first and only time to examine a problem with the kitchen floor so I knew what I was in for when the responsibility for dealing with her stuff fell on me after her relatives declined the opportunity to salvage any remnant of their family member’s worldly remains.
She’d spent the last four or five months in the hospital and rehab center. When I entered the apartment, it was like shedding the first rays of swirling dusty light upon an ancient undisturbed tomb. As I entered, my attention was drawn to the fake wood plaque sitting on the end table that she probably had picked up at a truck stop or Cracker Barrel. It read ‘God Bless This Mess’. The kaleidoscopic clutter strewn over every surface from the floor to the furniture attested to her faith in having received absolution for a surrender to chaos that could only have been granted by divine indulgence. Like a bird’s nest built with scraps, discards and fragments, her cramped abode was covered with the loose change of everyday existence. It wasn’t garbage, just a timeless accumulation of cheap junk and medical supplies.
Presiding over this sepulcher of her meager relics, like funerary figurines perched along the back of the couch and cushioned chair, stationed in numerous shelves and lying in wait in cabinets and drawers, was a lifelong collection of stuffed bears. Like an immortal corps of ursine sentinels, their glassy eyes had been fixed in unwavering stares on a dark and soundless abandoned chamber, patiently searching for their adoring queen. I stuffed her anthropomorphous family into their own trash bags in hopes that I would be able to get someone to adopt them but after repeated calls to her brother and a post on Craigslist failed to turn up any takers, they disappeared with most of the remainder of her possessions, carried away by the unseen hands of Bulk Pickup and alley scavengers.
It seemed so sad that everything this woman owned, her small solitary world, commanded no more respect than unwanted trash, so, partly out of respect to her, I tried to put as much of it as I could to some good use. I salvaged a few things for myself and let the guy who was rehabbing the place for me take what he wanted. I boxed and bagged up her clothing along with all the plastic, glass, paper and cardboard I could find and stuffed it all in my car for a trip to the recycling center conveniently situated beside the Volunteers of America store. It was raining as I pulled into the shopping center and I parked near the door on the side of the VOA building designated for drop offs.
I sprinted the short distance to the dry area under the small awning that jutted out from the store’s massive wall and rang the door bell. While waiting for a response, I looked over at my car to check on my young companion in his car seat. It was my day of the week to take care of him while his mother was at work. As I stood there, confined in the little invisible box that was protecting me from the rain, I could see his shaggy blonde hair and beautiful smiling face peeking through the rear side window. Here I was, almost sixty years old, having spent the last 4 or 5 years living alone, my own son and his childhood a distant, impenetrable memory, and now, suddenly I’ve opened my door to a young woman and her child, filling the house with crying, joyful screeches and adorable babbling, floors littered with food, toys, clothes, plastic containers and various kitchen utensils, a state of perpetual upheaval, sharing everything I have left to give, once again loving and being loved. I looked up at the towering wall composed of three dimensional bricks designed to undulate like concrete waves. I rang the bell again.
She’d spent the last four or five months in the hospital and rehab center. When I entered the apartment, it was like shedding the first rays of swirling dusty light upon an ancient undisturbed tomb. As I entered, my attention was drawn to the fake wood plaque sitting on the end table that she probably had picked up at a truck stop or Cracker Barrel. It read ‘God Bless This Mess’. The kaleidoscopic clutter strewn over every surface from the floor to the furniture attested to her faith in having received absolution for a surrender to chaos that could only have been granted by divine indulgence. Like a bird’s nest built with scraps, discards and fragments, her cramped abode was covered with the loose change of everyday existence. It wasn’t garbage, just a timeless accumulation of cheap junk and medical supplies.
Presiding over this sepulcher of her meager relics, like funerary figurines perched along the back of the couch and cushioned chair, stationed in numerous shelves and lying in wait in cabinets and drawers, was a lifelong collection of stuffed bears. Like an immortal corps of ursine sentinels, their glassy eyes had been fixed in unwavering stares on a dark and soundless abandoned chamber, patiently searching for their adoring queen. I stuffed her anthropomorphous family into their own trash bags in hopes that I would be able to get someone to adopt them but after repeated calls to her brother and a post on Craigslist failed to turn up any takers, they disappeared with most of the remainder of her possessions, carried away by the unseen hands of Bulk Pickup and alley scavengers.
It seemed so sad that everything this woman owned, her small solitary world, commanded no more respect than unwanted trash, so, partly out of respect to her, I tried to put as much of it as I could to some good use. I salvaged a few things for myself and let the guy who was rehabbing the place for me take what he wanted. I boxed and bagged up her clothing along with all the plastic, glass, paper and cardboard I could find and stuffed it all in my car for a trip to the recycling center conveniently situated beside the Volunteers of America store. It was raining as I pulled into the shopping center and I parked near the door on the side of the VOA building designated for drop offs.
I sprinted the short distance to the dry area under the small awning that jutted out from the store’s massive wall and rang the door bell. While waiting for a response, I looked over at my car to check on my young companion in his car seat. It was my day of the week to take care of him while his mother was at work. As I stood there, confined in the little invisible box that was protecting me from the rain, I could see his shaggy blonde hair and beautiful smiling face peeking through the rear side window. Here I was, almost sixty years old, having spent the last 4 or 5 years living alone, my own son and his childhood a distant, impenetrable memory, and now, suddenly I’ve opened my door to a young woman and her child, filling the house with crying, joyful screeches and adorable babbling, floors littered with food, toys, clothes, plastic containers and various kitchen utensils, a state of perpetual upheaval, sharing everything I have left to give, once again loving and being loved. I looked up at the towering wall composed of three dimensional bricks designed to undulate like concrete waves. I rang the bell again.
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