Rooming House

I didn’t write this about the world, I wrote it about myself.

My folks were raised during the Great Depression. The influence it had on them was palpable and in my little neighborhood made up of meat packers and other assorted laborers nearly everyone on our street had stories of growing up in poverty. For the kids, riding our bikes up and down the road and playing games that took up everyone’s yard, those stories were hard to understand and often boring to sit through, but we heard them over and over again even when they weren’t being spoken as stories rooted in history but as the living moment of history scared to return to the worst of the hard times. “Turn off the light”, “clean your plate”, “help the family, help the neighborhood”, “never ever quit a job that pays” were all ghosts of the Great Depression that haunted our house and every house on our street. When my parents were taken by cancer and then Parkinson’s disease, they left me nothing but those ghosts and the wisdom buried in their slogans. I heard them ringing in my ears during my working days as an outreach worker, serving the needs of the many many unhoused individuals and families that wait and wait and wait on our streets for some kind of help, living through their own Great Depression every single day.

My writing life has consistently recalled the words and deeds of my parents and our neighborhood, and it also contains the words and deeds of the poorest folks I’ve ever met, living their lives out of doors (and not by choice) in a northern city throughout all the seasons of the year, and the word it seems to utter the most is empathy. Nowadays it's a bad word, a word associated with weak and foolish people or “bleeding hearts”, whatever that is, and our natural capacity for understanding and caring and patience has been challenged by new trends that tell us to be angry, violent even, and blame and judge harshly other people who are essentially just ourselves dressed in rags.

Rooming House Album