Meditations in a Nail Shop

NSP Meditations

I am sitting in a neighborhood nail shop as my father receives a pedicure and manicure from an exceptionally kind and skilled specialist in such matters.

We are the only customers in the shop.

Some Spaghetti Western music plays.

Rain is falling outside and I can hear vehicles splashing by.

I insisted Dad get a regular pedicure because of something I read long ago in Being Mortal about how elderly people often don’t take care of their toenails and it can lead to serious health problems. So here I am, somewhere I never figured on being.

The shop smells of nail polish.

I am tempted to make a cup of instant coffee.

I’m taking a break from reading a new book that blames progressive people and politicians for the homeless crisis on the West Coast.

A general malaise seems to hang in the American air these days, as if there is no way out of the angry and insane mess of current American life. And just wait until the midterm elections and the probable overturn of Roe V Wade.

I brought a new copy of Steinbeck’s East of Eden and have read three chapters. I last the read book in the 80s and remember almost nothing of it, nor the James Dean movie I saw once. Let’s just say this novel is not holding up well. The Grapes of Wrath does. It’s more relevant today than when it came out during the Depression. It’s funny how some books transcend the decades or centuries and others do not. I occasionally wonder if anyone will be reading any of my books 20 or 50 or a hundred years from now.

Every time we visit this nail shop, Dad always pays double what they charge.

I’m writing this on my trusty 20+ year-old AlphaSmart 3000 word processor that is resting on my thighs. I had to laugh the other day when I read an essay in the New Yorker proclaiming this ancient analog device the key to distraction free writing for professional writers. Hahahahahah. I’ve know that since 1997 when I first discovered them at a rural school on the Oregon Coast. They are my great secret weapon to getting the writing going so long ago and to still keep cranking it out.

We’re almost finished. Time to get up and get Dad to the car.

A Poem Takes on New Meaning

NSP Meditations

I was perusing an anthology of American poetry when I encountered a poem, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” by my favorite American poet, Richard Hugo. I knew the poem well, and never tire of reading it.

I read it again and the poem exploded off the page into new meaning and relevance. It is a poem written almost a half century ago about the bitterness, intransigence and near death of a rural town.

The poem was probably true back then, although I had no first hand adult knowledge of American small towns from that era.

In the second stanza, the first two lines read:

The principal supporting business now is rage…

That’s because everything the small town used to know and do had gone away and the residents had to blame someone or some thing.

The principal supporting business now is rage…

Rage about sums up a large part of cultural life in rural towns in America, a rage fanned by Fox News, Trump, hate radio, locally elected officials, and often the churches.

And I would know because I lived in a typical rural town for four years not too long ago and rage was everywhere.

I read the poem again and wondered how such towns ever rid themselves of rage. I really have no idea. Have they always been that way? Is there a happy small town in the nation today?

Obituaries of the Eugene Homeless

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Not too long ago I came across one of the more incredible projects connected to documenting the plight of the homeless in Oregon, or anywhere in America for that matter. I felt compelled to share here in my newsletter and hope readers will explore it. If I were still teaching, I would have had my students read these obituaries and then run them through a series of writing and thinking prompts. I hope there are teachers out there doing this kind of lesson on this subject.

Below is the description of the project, an interview with one of its reporters, and a link to the obituaries of the Eugene homeless people who died in 2021.

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Eugene Weekly is attempting to write obituaries for every homeless person the paper learns of who died in Eugene in 2021. So far, the paper has told of the life and death of thirteen people. Ella Hutcherson is a reporter for Eugene Weekly and wrote several of the stories. She joins us to talk about the project.

Dave Miller: At the beginning of this year, Eugene Weekly started an ambitious project. They would try to write obituaries for every homeless person they learned of who died in Eugene in 2021. So far, the paper has told about the life and the death of 13 people. Ella Hutcherson is a reporter for Eugene Weekly. She has written several of these stories, and she joins us now to talk about this project. Ella, welcome.

Ella Hutcherson: Hi, thank you so much.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. The first obituary that you worked on was for a man named Charles Rintalan. Can you tell us a little bit about him?

Hutcherson: Charles was a man who was homeless in Eugene for about 40 years of his life. During the last two years of his life, he lived in the home of his sister, who I was able to speak with about him. He had a golden retriever dog named Boo, he loved nature, he loved helping people. He often volunteered to help people with their gardens. He drove around in this van that Ann told me was just kind of akin to an art object, because it was just so decorated, and kind of something that he had turned into his home for the decades that he was without one.

Miller: One of the things that’s really striking about his story is, as you noted, just how long he was homeless for: about 40 years in the area. I imagine that, as a result of that, a lot of people in Eugene or in Lane County might have passed by him, or seen his van, or talked to him over the course of 40 years, perhaps without knowing that much about him. What kinds of responses did you get after his obituary ran?

Hutcherson: The main response that I got myself was from his sister. Initially when I called her, she kind of thought that I was asking to include Charles in a story about homeless people who had died during Covid. But when I explained to her that I wanted to write an obituary for Charles personally, things really turned around in our conversation and she was much more forthcoming with me about who he was and what his life was like.

After the obituary came out, I heard from her. She wrote me this really kind email about how much that had meant to her and the people, the family and friends, that had reached out to her personally. So, knowing that she had gotten feedback, and she had gotten people reaching out, was the primary positive response that I remember from getting that obituary out there.

Miller: Has it been hard to get family members to talk about the people they’ve lost?

Hutcherson: You know, in my experience, it really isn’t. I can’t speak for every obituary that’s been done, I know it’s different in every case, but in my reporting experience with this project, people who I’ve spoken to really want to tell me about the people that they’ve lost. They want to tell me about their personalities and their hobbies and their passions, but also why they were homeless, because typically they’re angry about it, and they’re upset at the system, and they want that story out there, because people have a reaction to that. So, I’ve never had a problem. Once I get people on the phone. Honestly, getting people on the phone is the hardest part. Then, once you’re having that conversation, they’ve always been willing to share, in my experience.

Miller: It does seem like one of the hallmarks of this series is that you and the other writers are writing frankly about both people’s struggles and their strengths, but you’re not sugarcoating things. How do you think about that balance, when you’re writing a full picture of somebody’s life and death, when these are people who spent a lot of years living on the street?

Hutcherson: That’s a good question. It’s like what you said, like it’s painting the full picture; their homelessness is an aspect of their story, and an aspect of their lives, just as other things are. When I’m writing those stories I’m trying to be clear that while it’s not the only thing that defined who they were, it was something that they dealt with and an obstacle that they faced. That’s not something we should shy away from, especially if we’re trying to draw attention to a really serious crisis in our community. So just like you said, getting that full picture in there, I think, is really important.

Miller: Can you tell us a little bit about Sarah Fallingwater, another person whose obituary you wrote?

Hutcherson: Sarah died in Eugene, and she was in her 40s when she passed away. She dealt with severe mental health problems and methamphetamine abuse, which led to her death, but she was also a former nursing assistant and she was very passionate about nursing. She just seemed like a really determined and hardworking woman, and talking to her mother was very emotional because it had only been a few days since she passed when I spoke to her. Everything was still very fresh and very raw, but that was also a really, really impactful story to work on.

Miller: In the obituaries that you’ve run, you’ve relied a fair amount, it seems from reading them, on interviews with people’s family members. Have you also run into cases where you simply can’t find information about the people who have died?

Hutcherson: I have, yes. Those are really hard. I was trying to write a story for a while about a woman who had died homeless in Eugene. All we had was her name and her death date, and I searched databases, called the funeral home, was sifting through facebook, for almost a month, trying to find someone to speak with, and we never found anybody. The only person I made contact with wasn’t even sure that they were related to her, and could never really figure it out, so we couldn’t find anyone who knew that person. That was really hard.

Miller: You know, another way to think about it that just occurred to me is it’s possible to see it as more surprising, how rare that is, given the way sometimes people might think about homelessness. That then how common it was for you [to find someone]. For the most part, you’ve been able to get in touch with people, many of whom don’t live that far away, who are family members or friends, who can tell you about the lives of the people who are living on the street. That seems to have been more the norm than people for whom you can’t find connections.

I wonder if you could tell us one more story about somebody you wrote about. This is the most recent obituary that you wrote, for a woman named Shandee Franke.

Hutcherson: Yes. Shandee died recently in Eugene. She was only 25 years old. I spoke with her mother as well, and her mother just told me these stories about how she loved animals, and she rescued animals. Her mother’s current dog is a chihuahua that she rescued and brought to her mother. Her boyfriend took his life in January, and she had already really been struggling at that point, and she ended up taking her own life in October. She was so young, so that one was really difficult, but also, I think, got a pretty impassioned reaction from the community when it came out.

Miller: What were the particular issues that you had to navigate for her obituary, given that she died by suicide?

Hutcherson: Just being intentional with the words that I’m using. I continue to feel like we can’t shy away from what really happened in these instances, and there is a serious mental health crisis in this community. She was dealing with serious mental health issues that were not effectively addressed by the systems that are in place here, and that’s a serious problem. Illustrating that, but also being sensitive to that, it’s definitely a tightrope to walk, but it’s important, and her mother really wanted that aspect of the story out there actually, so that we could illustrate what a problem it was. That wasn’t an issue that I ran into.

Miller: Ella, the mothers of both Shandee Franke and Sarah Fallingwater, in their obituaries, it seemed that they made an effort to talk about the way they saw the deaths of their children as being examples of larger failures, societal failures, failures in the system. This was also the case in other ones for the series that you didn’t write. What did they tell you about what they wanted the public to know?

Hutcherson: What they wanted the public to know is what I made an effort to put at the forefront of the article. When I’m reporting, I try to follow the lead of the people that I’m talking to, in what they feel is important, and in both of their cases, as soon as I got on the phone, they wanted to tell me about the structural failings that had led to their daughters’ deaths. If that was something that they felt was important, then I absolutely was not going to shy away from including that in the article, because it is important, and if that’s something they want out there, then it needs to be out there.

Miller: Have you ever worked on a project like this before?

Hutcherson: I absolutely had not. This is new to me.

Miller: Why did you want to work on it?

Hutcherson: Well, I do think that it’s unique, and I think that it’s accomplishing something important on a couple of levels, because it is bringing peace to the families and friends of the people that were lost. It’s providing a story to these people who were really multifaceted, complex, nuanced individuals, and on a broader level, it’s highlighting multiple serious problems in our community that need to be addressed. When you have a face to that crisis, it makes people become more invested in that crisis, and it makes it abundantly more clear just how close to us it really all is.

Miller: What do you think you’ve learned, in the process of working on these obituaries?

Hutcherson: I think I’ve learned the same thing that I’m trying to illustrate to the community; I’ve learned just how entangled in this problem we all are, and how close it truly is to us. Also, it has made me abundantly more aware how intertwined the mental health crisis and the homeless crisis really are. I think if we can invest more in mental health, then we can help with the homeless crisis. That is such a huge problem here. It’s really, really a massive crisis. This has made that all that much more clear to me, just talking to the people who are involved and understanding their anger and exactly what they’re upset about.

Miller: Ella Hutcherson, thanks very much.

Hutcherson: Thank you.

Miller: Ella Hutchison is a reporter for Eugene Weekly. She’s one of the members of the team that’s been writing obituaries for homeless people who have died in Eugene over the course of this year.

Read the obituaries at https://www.eugeneweekly.com/category/obituary/

The End of My Letters

NSP Meditations ,

A snowstorm delayed the dreaded, yet inevitable removal of a major part of my personal life.

That life lay out on the curb, stuffed inside the recycling bin, waiting for the hauler to take it away for processing into something I can only hope ends up useful.

It was time to let them go: all the letters an cards received from the mid 1980s to the mid 2000s. Hundreds and hundreds, no, thousands. But I didn’t bother to count or read them all one last time.

Let’s say I perused them, especially the ones from the special correspondents. I picked out a greatest hits for safekeeping and perhaps, another read years from now.

These letters arrived from all corners of the Earth and all corners of the heart. Several of the correspondents wrote me well over a hundred letters. It was the last great age of letter writing and card sending. Of course the Internet killed the genre for all time, and the loss to our culture is incalculable.

So why am I discarding these treasures?

I have no one to leave them to.

I needed to move forward and not look back.

I have no relationship anymore with the recipients.

Many of them are too painful to revisit.

They taught me what I needed to be taught in this final perusal.

I have 150 volumes of personal journals for personal reference and don’t need the correspondence anymore.

I’m trying to reduce my personal possessions so they fit inside a 24-foot RV.

The stories contained within the correspondence have died away or the Matt they were writing to back then died as well.

I just looked out the window again. The bin is still there, waiting for the hauler. It’s still slick outside. Maybe one more day.

I still write letters. A few people still write me. I received an unexpected Christmas letter the other day from a former teaching colleague. What a joy it was to hear from this far flung friend. Of course I wrote back. I always do.

One afternoon, over three decades ago, I got together with a woman for a unique short-lived relationship and I asked why she’d decided to take up with me.

“Your letters. The letters.”

Can that letter writing magic still happen to people today, outside of those who are incarcerated? That horrible state is probably the last bastion of letter writing left in America. What a strange development, that something so cruel, barbaric and debilitating—imprisonment—could keep the hope of love letters alive.

Restoring a Human Watercourse

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(What follows is a piece about the homeless that I previously posted on my newsletter, The New American Diaspora. You can read more of my writing on this issue by going to https://mattlove.substack.com/ Thanks for supporting this new writing project.)

A crew of six or seven city parks employees worked on a weekday morning to restore an urban salmon-bearing stream to full ecology.

I knew it was a watershed restoration project because I performed this exact type of labor in my decade-long service as a caretaker of a national wildlife refuge and coordinator of a watershed council for two years.

In the case of the stream restoration project I was observing this morning, the work entailed removing non-native plants in the riparian area and conducting maintenance on native trees previously planted.

It’s hard work to repair a century’s worth of watershed abuse and degradation at the hands of rapacious capitalism. Yes, very hard and expensive work that takes decades to show results. The investment is for the future, the long term. In other words, the unAmerican way.

I stopped and watched the crew. A hundred yards away was my neighborhood homeless encampment situated somewhat along the stream. In fact, many residents draw their water from it via buckets or ingenious contraptions involving garden hoses and bicycle pumps.

Interesting, I thought: a project to restore a damaged stream in close proximity to a small community of damaged humans in dire need of restoration.

What does that juxtaposition say about us? I could write 100,000 words trying to answer that question and still not answer it adequately. Perhaps it is a totally unanswerable question.

I do believe, however, these damaged entities are connected. How can they not be when we’re all mostly made from water and need water to survive? Why wouldn’t you restore both at the same time since we, indeed everything living, are part of a watershed and the healthier a single watershed the healthier everything is in the world, ecologically and spiritually.

As I stood there, I wondered how would you apply the lessons of successful stream restoration to restoring a damaged human community.

To restore a salmon-bearing stream in Oregon requires culverts that don’t impede fish passage, cool, clean water not subjected to erosion from logging, grazing or mining, native vegetation, stream channel complexity with pools, side channels, abundant gravel, in-stream woody debris, insect life, native critters, diverse tree cover to provide shade, and wetlands to protect rearing fish when high water flows occur.

In previous decades, economic development, blind greed and terrible science destroyed streams, rivers and estuaries across Oregon and beyond. Then, slowly, as species disappeared, recognition grew in many quarters that destructive practices had to change. New laws compelled these changes.

Of course, there are still dams and clearcuts and mining wrecking Oregon’s watersheds, but I have worked with my own two hands to begin the restoration of creeks, estuaries and forests that were in perilous condition. It was the greatest work of my life and I know it will make a difference in the long run. I might even live long enough to see some of it.

I sat down on a bench and turned my attention toward the encampment. Could I apply the lessons and metaphors of restoring a damaged Oregon stream to the restoration of a damaged stream of Oregon humanity? It seemed like an almost impossible mental, let alone a material task but I gave it a try. I had nothing else to do.

This imaginative enterprise was a highly complicated task that I quickly realized would require more time than this particular morning. This was merely the initial attempt. So, I pulled out my notebook and jotted down some ideas. I even sketched a diagram.

My notes:

We must never use herbicides in restoring this stream of humanity. What might those herbicides be?

We must create a wetlands because human beings need places of refuge during high flows. What would something like a wetlands for human beings look like? Places of friendship, faith, service, learning, solitude.

This stream needs better flow. There are too many barriers and plugged culverts.

Mushroom riff

The destructive erosion of capitalism into this stream must be abated.

Bring in the damn beavers! (No metaphor here.) Wait, they’re already in the stream near the encampment! Look to their lodges for ideas for tiny homes!

AN IDEA! A POSSIBLE GREAT NOTION struck me sitting on the bench. It was:

What would it be like to teach a creative thinking workshop to employees of government agencies and non profit organizations tasked with solving Oregon’s homeless crisis and pairing themwith watershed restoration experts to have them lead us into a deep dive into the reality and metaphor of successful restoration work.

Perhaps something extraordinary might evolve from such a workshop and produce a model that might succeed and then be replicated across the various degraded streams of humanity all across the country.

Any participation in the workshop would require a gigantic leap of imagination by social service professionals, non profit administrators, advocates for the homeless, and politicians already wedded to myths, reputations, budgets, agendas, and gobbledygook jargon.

Why not try? Whatever these professionals are doing now isn’t working and moving incompetently with a glacial, inexcusable, immoral pace. They can’t clean up garbage. They miss deadline after deadline to erect housing. They erect benches on a side street that cost $500,000 and are not designed for sitting, but rather to deter homeless camping. Imagine building benches that no one is supposed to sit on as a part of a rational policy to solve the homeless crisis.

The workshop might prove a comical bust because some (alleged) experts in their field think they know everything and can’t be taught anything. Most public school teachers are like that and I would know because I was one for almost 25 years and often watched them mock a new idea to address a problem, such as a high school drop rate that hasn’t changed in half a century.

I could teach the class in a day—for free! We wouldn’t need a weekend retreat costing taxpayers a hundred grand. We wouldn’t need Zoom calls and PowerPoint/slide deck bullshit. We don’t need to gather any data. We would have to get into the field, or more accurately, into a stream for a hands-on approach to constructing the metaphorical model. I just know the damn beavers will show up! They love modeling (without knowing they are doing so) their industrious and artistic purposes for human beings to glean something useful.

Maybe this is all stupid, a fantasy, a waste of time, a dilettante’s dream. I admit that I don’t know if the lessons for stream restoration will apply to human restoration. Perhaps many of you reading this will laugh in derision at the idea. Doubtless, the professionals working to solve the homeless crisis will scoff. I want to state, for whatever it’s worth: I am no dilettante when it comes to caring for wrecked people, wrecked dogs and wrecked watersheds.

I need my mind to saute this notion. More will emerge, I can feel it. I walk along this creek and through this encampment every morning, I will always have plenty of visual refreshment to energize my mind.

Something splashed in the creek below me and I got up to investigate. Nothing. But it was time to go anyway, so on I went.

A Choice Cut on New Year’s Day

NSP Meditations

A freezing chill gripped the air—22 degrees to be exact. It was just after dawn on the first day of 2022. I was walking the neighborhood and somewhat following a salmon-bearing creek that flowed through the city until it emptied into the Willamette River.

Traces of snow remained on the ground. My mood flirted between melancholy and listlessness, but still I was outside trying to make something interesting happen. Nothing happens unless you move forward.

I came upon a culvert, stopped, looked down to the creek and beheld something so glorious, so unexpected, so magically Oregon: a log jam of at least a dozen choice cuts of grade A Oregon beaverwood. In the big city! They were all fresh, too!

O joy! Thank you Mother Nature. Thank you upstream Oregon beavers. You must have had one helluva party last night. Hungover for sure you bucktoothed revelers.

I simply had to start 2022 with a choice cut to add to my collection. I knew it would be a harbinger of great things to come. I clambered down the bank to the water’s edge using willows as handrails. Oh what a selection! Which one to choose! Should I take them all?

No. Only one. Don’t get greedy. Leave some for the other beaverwood connoisseurs.

Sure, the other beaverwood connoisseurs out there. How many are there?

It occurred to me that I was probably the only person in North America who was retrieving a choice cut of beaverwood to begin the New Year.

Why not? It’s better than watching a college football ball game.

I found my prize; a two-foot hunk about as thick as my upper leg. It would look fantastic displayed in the window sill, along with another beauty from a nearby river.

Walking home, I cradled it like a football. I passed a couple of other walkers and they shot me mystified looks. Oh well, just another urban freak, some nut.

Happy New Year!

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