A small older man began regularly
appearing at the Sea Star. Every day and almost all day
until the sun went down.
I first saw him sitting at the bar one
summer afternoon, hunched over a large paperback and glass of water.
He was not OTA. He wore a plaid short-sleeve shirt neatly tucked into
blue jeans. He wore glasses and a big watch on his left wrist.
Over the course of the next few weeks,
I observed his curious routine of reading books, drinking water,
getting up to use the restroom, leaving the Sea Star for short walks,
and filling up a water bowl for his dog, who was presumably nearby.
The man hardly said a word to anyone when I was there.
It was pretty obvious he was homeless,
but the pattern of his movements seemed highly peculiar. I’d never
seen such a thing in OTA country before.
One day as I passed him on my way out,
I studied his face. It was a third vacant, a third confused, and a
third forlorn. It was unlike any face I had ever seen in person, on
film, or read about in books. It was almost as if some amateur
woodworker had used a router to grind out an original face of utter
despair.
Who was this man? What was his story?
In short order, Gary, Linda, and
Miranda, a Sea Star daytime bartender, got the scoop on the man’s
plight, or at least tidbits of it, from the man himself.
He was local and had recently been
evicted from his home for non-payment of the mortgage. Apparently his
finances had withered because he was sending money to various “women”
in several countries. At least one of them had promised to visit him.
It all sounded like a classic catfishing operation but he denied a
scheme and remained steadfast in his conviction that a woman from
Turkey was coming soon. Miranda also informed me that he had lost his
wife to cancer several years ago and had served as her caregiver.
Somehow the man had landed at the Sea
Star and was living out of his mini-van with a Labrador. In the three
weeks since his appearance, he’d never purchased a single drink,
alcoholic or otherwise, and never gambled. I never once saw him look
at a television. Just water and novels all day long and sometimes he
didn’t read, but sat there, hunched over, staring into the old
shuffleboard table that served as the scuffed Sea Star counter.
At some point, management of the bar
had a conversation with the man about his non-paying presence, and
occasional panhandling inside the joint.
Incredibly, at least in my mind,
management said he could continue his routine (absent the
panhandling) until the end of the month when a benefit check was
supposed to arrive. He was even allowed to park out back of the Sea
Star!
It was an extraordinary act of kindness
from OTA country, and when some of us learned of it, we sprang into
action. It was as if one simple act of kindness broke the dam and
washed away the hostility that several regulars had demonstrated
toward the man. He doesn’t buy anything! He’s taking up space! He
needs to find somewhere else to be homeless! He can’t beg in
here! Call the cops!
Why do the actions
of the poor engender more anger than the actions of the rich? Often
the most searing anger toward the poor emanates from poor people
themselves. I have never understood this but I keep trying to
understand.
Like I said, one
act of kindness witnessed or heard about second-hand, and the gospel
gets around. Call the gospel the dynamite of kindness. Watch it blow
the dam to smithereens.
Someone at the Sea
Star told the man about low-cost motels and a county non profit that
might help him with housing. Gary and Linda brought in dog food, dog
treats and smoked tuna! There were gifts of garden vegetables. I
bought dog food, recommended novels from the Sea Star’s library, and
offered my tent.
We rallied together
to help the man. In doing so, we rallied ourselves, found fortitude,
and staved off all the anger that poisons American life these days.
There is nothing like rallying on behalf of someone who needs help,
rallying without agenda.
More of that. If we
don’t, we will perish from this earth.
Let me
run with the word perish. An Apache proverb goes: the earth
will perish with spiderwebs in the sky. Perish is such a
beautiful-sounding verb to describe the act of dying. There is poetry
in it. There is something transcendent there. Perish is also the
cornerstone verb of the Gettysburg Address, the greatest 272 words in
the history of everything inspiring written about the promise of
American life. President Lincoln wrote it himself and read it to
mourners on bloody ground. He wrote it to rally Americans to an ideal
of what democratic government is supposed to be. He delivered it to
rally Americans to the idea of healing deadly divisions.
We obviously don’t have that kind of
President today. So let us rally ourselves instead and help men like
the one lost in the Sea Star. Let us help women, children, animals
and watersheds, too. It all begins with kindness and in this case, it
began in a dive bar on the Oregon Coast.
Amen. Now get to work!
