Silver and Golden Christmas Falls (Part 1)

Fiction, NSP Meditations ,

(Author’s note: What follows is a nine-part Christmas tale where I explore the idea of fiction as raising consciousness and prompting action on the homeless crisis.)

Alongside a downtown avenue in the city of Coos Bay, Oregon…come look…on the day after Thanksgiving…at the Bradshaw Family Christmas Tree Village, going on its second century of selling Christmas trees, situated on a vacant lot near the Elks Club and the Steve Prefontaine mural with an immortal quote from the distance running legend, “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.”

But what is a person’s gift? What happens if they never identify it? What happens if they never even try and identify it? At least Prefontaine knew his and gave it his all before his tragic death. How many of us can say that?

Come closer and you will see a fire pit, tool shed, a cherry 1975 GMC, red-and-white, Sierra pickup and a canned ham trailer, a Shasta model from the 1960s. Sixty-six-year old Wayne Bradshaw and his brown lab Chief resided in the Shasta on the lot during the holiday season and the tree-selling operation annually netted Wayne roughly the amount he owed in property taxes on the lot and the Bradshaw family farm past Allegheny, up the Millocoma River. Wayne always paid his tax bill, last year $2,752, in change, to piss off the county assessor.

Running the tree lot was the only job Wayne held, had ever held, and it wasn’t really a job. It was preservation.

The Bradshaw tree lot was no typical Christmas tree lot. It once was. It sold only one kind of Christmas tree: Douglas firs, hundreds of them, planted in ceramic (never plastic) pots of all sizes. There were your seven-foot beauties, your 12-inch Charlie Browns, and everything in between, all grown on the Bradshaw farm in non-plantation style and without any chemicals or irrigation. They were watered with only Oregon Coast rainwater. To restate: Only live Christmas trees, only Doug firs, Oregon’s state tree, no herbicides. Wayne wanted nothing to do with killing or poisoning of anything in nature. It almost goes without saying that none of Wayne’s trees were flocked. A Doug fir is Oregon green and Christmas trees are green and smell like pitch and pine.

Trees cost either $3, $10, $15. Wayne always extracted a promise from a buyer to plant the tree after the holiday season, in the yard, in a clearcut, it didn’t matter. Just plant and remember where you planted and visit the tree over the years. Seeing the growth of tree you planted is perhaps the greatest lesson a person can learn.

Another quirk of the lot was that every year Wayne arranged the trees in a new maze, lit it up with twinkling white lights, and only played Christmas soul music from the 60s and 70s on cassette tape through one tinny speaker. His favorite was The Temptations’ Christmas Card. He also rigged up his childhood Lionel train set under Plexiglas and the kids (and adults) went nuts for the throwback spectacle, complete with toots, whistles and a smokestack emitting tiny wisps of white as the locomotive chugged through a magical Christmas territory of cottages, elves, reindeer and snow. In other words, the holiday season on Wayne’s lot was everything Coos County 2021 Christmas was not with their Fuck Biden and His Kamala Ho signs around the area, including more than a few posted next to a nativity scene, and insulting the Salvation Army bell ringers because they were wearing masks.

It hadn’t always been so eccentric for the Bradshaw Family Christmas Tree Village, but Wayne changed the lot 45 years ago, much to Coos Bay’s displeasure. He took it over from his father who dropped dead in his boat while trying to land a coho salmon on the Umpqua River. It was the perfect sublime way for the angry son-of-a-bitch to die. Wayne defied the old man’s desire for a Christian burial in a cemetery and had him cremated instead. Then he spread the ashes on the Coos River and Wayne smiled knowing that his father had finally given back some life to a watershed he’d tried to murder his entire adult existence as a logger, miner, fisherman, farmer, hunter and landowner who dumped oil and paint right into anything that moved downstream.

It was a novelty in 1976 to offer live Christmas trees and unthinkable not to offer the popular noble firs. So be it. Doug firs. In a pot. Take it or leave it. Many chose to leave it and business dwindled for a decade until Wayne rigged up the maze, installed a fire pit for crackling, toasty fires, piped in the soul music, and dressed up his labs in cut-up, cast-off, Christmas sweaters and faux antlers.

Wayne did retain one tradition of the lot, one that his grandfather began in the 1930s: every customer had to sign a massive, Dickens-like, Bob Cratchit ledger and leave a little personal message of cheer. The current one dated from the early 1990s and all the volumes taken as a whole constituted a kind a graphology museum to the increasingly lost art of handwriting and expressing sentiment by something else besides a text message.

Over the years, merry word got out about the Bradshaw Family Christmas Tree Village and families traveled from far away as Eugene to the east, Gold Beach to the south, and Florence to the north, to visit the lot and take home a nice tree and of course, add a second Charlie Brown because every adult inherently wishes to be the person who rescues a forlorn tree from oblivion. They see a kind of allegory in that.

Wayne Bradshaw was the last of his family. His older sister had disappeared to California after graduating from high school and was never seen again. Wayne kept the lot going He prepared for it all year long and then when the time came, he towed the Shasta to town, set up the operation, and kept it going seven days a week, including Christmas Day, because there was always someone struggling on the move who happened by and Wayne knew they needed a free tree. It was sometimes an overwhelming sight to Wayne to see a homeless man carrying a potted Doug fir to some tent encampment in the willows around Coos Bay and he was seeing more of that kind of sight every passing year. He didn’t know why it was happening. He didn’t know who these people were. They seemed almost faceless to him even though he stared into their faces every Christmas, as do many Americans stare into the faces of homeless people all across the land.

What are we seeing there?

On the Idea of Social Reform Novel about the Homeless

NSP Meditations

In 1902, the great social reform novelist Frank Norris wrote:

If the novel were not one of the most important factors of modern life…if its influence were not greater than all the pulpits, than all the newspapers between the oceans, it would not be so important that its message should be true. ..The people look today as they never have looked before, as they never will look again, to the writer of fiction to give them an idea of Life beyond their limits, and they believe him as they never have believed before and never will again.

And perhaps Norris was right back in the days before television and radio. Consider how influential Sinclair Lewis’ great muckraking novel The Jungle was when it was published and led to federal legislation to reform the meatpacking industry that improved American life and delivered a swift uppercut to rapacious and brutal capitalism in at least one round of the ongoing bout that pits capitalism against humanity. Capitalism is currently beating us senseless and there is no referee to stop it on a technical knockout.

Can novels sway American thinking today on a timely subject? Can they reach a wide audience and get Presidents to act on a crisis in America?

No. Such a novel is not even attempted today, on any social reform issue, at least to my knowledge, and I do follow these things. I might add here, that the best writing on social reform issues going on today is in crime fiction.

If such a big Dickens-like American novel was attempted, it would have to be a novel of class, all the classes, over generations of American life, all colors and desires and barriers in American life. This kind of vast scope is seemingly well beyond the talent of American novelists. They probe the micro in our domestic relations.

I am not talking about historical fiction that travels back in time to address a great social reform issue from the past, such as slavery or Prohibition or child labor or women’s suffrage. American writers do that very well. They also write great environmentally-conscious raising novels.

Regarding the homeless crisis, which is what interests me the most as an American and a writer, it would have to be a social reform novel of non work. How do you write a novel of non work? No one would do anything but be homeless, which is, a lot of work. The novelist could focus attention on all the work being performed to solve the crisis, but that misdirects attention toward an upper class of professionals. I don’t want to read a novel about that.

The emphasis of such a sweeping reform novel about the homeless crisis would not be on race or gender or sexual preference. Class would be paramount. Marx was right once, he will always be right. Class is it. Class is everything. The novelist would have to dive into economics and what novelist wants to write about the dismal science and public policy about homelessness?

I had no interest in this subject until I became one of the actors in this crisis because of my incarceration and marginalization and living among the members of the New American Diaspora in a 42-year old RV that never moved. I saw activity that no other American writer of my generation had ever witnessed. It’s still going on.

Now, the subject fires my creative mind and desire to serve.

Sinclair Lewis spent seven weeks among workers in the meat packing industry before writing The Jungle. I think he lived where they lived.

Should I go live in an encampment for seven weeks and then write a novel based on the experience? It seems a shallow and dilettantish approach and besides, I don’t want to live in a tent in a homeless encampment for one night. I saw more than enough during my adjudication and living in a ramshackle RV park in the middle of nowhere, that at least had an ocean view for the shipwrecked Americans living there who never bothered to visit the ocean. They were too busy watching Fox News.

As I have written previously about my writing on the homeless issue, I don’t know where the writing is going. I have no book in mind, nor structure for a book. But I have toyed with the idea of a novel. I’ve even warmed up by writing a 10,000-word Christmas tale that features a homeless veteran who gets a job on a Christmas tree lot in Coos Bay. It’s coming to the newsletter next and blog in nine installments of roughly a thousand words each. I want to believe this work of fiction will inspire at least one person to act in some way on behalf of the homeless issue. Okay, maybe more than that!

This upcoming tale is my Christmas gift to all you readers who read this blog and newsletter. Please share this post and help me spread my word. And Merry Christmas.

Christmas Rakes (Part 4)

Fiction, NSP Meditations

Five minutes later, the grandchildren were geared up and ready to do battle. Grandfather peeled off a couple US Grants from a rubber-banded roll and the brats stuffed them in their pockets.

Grandfather knew how he would coax these Freddy freeloaders into hard work. He borrowed a rake and began dancing with it like it was Ginger Rodgers to his Fred Astaire. Then he held the rake like a Tommy Gun and blasted the coppers like James Cagney in White Heat. You’ll never take me alive! yelled Grandfather in his best gangster voice.

The grand kids quickly got into it. Thank God Grandfather had read Mark Twain and knew how Tom Sawyer tricked the boys into whitewashing the fence for him. Oh yeah, that was the old man’s cagey strategy! He was going full tilt Tom Sawyer on them. Plus he was paying good wages! Tom paid diddly squat.

The son pulled up in his sedan. He carried out three rakes to the yard and leaned them against a picnic table. His wife gave him a smile and a nod. They went inside to change their clothes. The grand kids and Grandfather kept raking and horsing around.

At one point, Grandfather instructed the grand kids to try out a James Cagney-gangster insult on him. He ripped off one, C‘mon you filthy geezer, get to work and then it was their turn. They gave it a try and cracked up before finishing. They tried again and pulled it off. It was such glorious fun! Then they riffed on their own. Hey you old fart wizard, fork over the loot. Hey you senile incontinent coot, cough up the cash. Grandfather yukked it up with every new improvisation.

The parents showed up and they went to work. They raked as a family. The piles grew. They developed a unique system to their raking and piling of leaves, just like every American family used to do when American families raked leaves together in the football fall afternoons.

Two hours elapsed. They had created two enormous piles the size of haystacks. The grand kids stood in front of the piles and glowed with admiration. Then on pure instinct, the boy and girl sprinted toward a pile and dove in screaming headlong. They tunneled through, stood up, and dove in again. Their dad joined them. Mom was next.

Grandfather watched it all with a rake in his hand. A few minutes later he called the grand kids over. They were soaked with sweat and panting. While the parents tidied up the piles, Grandfather peeled off three Ben Franklins for each kid. They rubbed and kissed the dollars with delight like Tiny Tim might have done with a toy, had he ever received one.

It was time to load the leaves in the cart and dump them on the street. Grandfather told the grandchildren to get cracking. He was off to the truck for their real Christmas present so get ready. He’d be right back. Real Christmas present? More dough!

Grandfather jogged to the truck, took off his coat, and strapped on Satan. It was already gassed up and ready to wake the dead. A few seconds later he was standing in front of the leaf piles. The grand kids looked perplexed. The son did not.

Merry Christmas bellowed Grandfather. He yanked the starter on Satan. It roared to life and belched smoke from hell. He extended the barrel toward the pile. The grand kids were sore afraid. Ho! Ho! Ho! Grandfather turned on the blower and walked toward the piles. The kids backed away.

Grandfather blew the piles to smithereens. He blew leave into the bodies of his grandchildren. His son and daughter in-law burst into laughter.

Satan blasted the grand kids to their knees. Then they collapsed. They were giggling like drunken hyenas. The yard was an unholy mess. Grandfather turned off Satan. The grand kids stood up. Peace ruled the yard. Okay, who wants to go first with this machine and get these damn leaves on to the street? Forget the cart! I’m still paying $150 an hour! His grandchildren sprinted toward him. Sure, a brawl would ensue to see who got to wield Satan first. Satan is like that. There might even be Christmas Day blood spilled. All in the name of leaves.

Christmas Rakes (Part 3)

Fiction, NSP Meditations

Grandfather checked the forecast religiously in the days preceding Christmas. All was looking good. Cold and dry. No rain whatsoever. He laughed. God was on his side!

On Christmas morning, Grandfather loaded his truck with the presents and drove to Portland. He was in a merry, merry mood, and turned on the oldies radio station and grooved to the cornball holiday hits as he passed fields and forests. The Clackamas River was running with its usual frosty grandeur and Grandfather noticed a couple of fishermen casting for salmon. When Oregon men and women stopped fishing on Christmas morning, either sober, stoned, or drunk, then Oregon was dead.

Grandfather parked a block away from the Sellwood house so he would go undetected hatching his scheme. He grabbed the rakes and cart and left Satan in the truck. He was saving Satan for last!

He stashed the rakes in the garage and affixed red and green bows on the tines. He even wrapped silver tinsel around the handles. He was going all out! It was Christmas for chrissakes!

Grandfather knocked on the door. It was high noon. His son and daughter in-law greeted and they all wished each other Merry Christmas in perfunctory manner. The brats were still in their pajamas, lounging on the couch and playing with their new shiny gadgets unwrapped earlier that morning. They sort of looked up at Grandfather and said hello and Merry Christmas. All they really cared about was how many smackers were inside the cards they never bothered to read.

The usual routine was to unwrap gifts first and then nibble the stringy ham and soupy scalloped potatoes from Costco. But not this year. Grandfather insisted they eat before he gave his special gift to his darling grandchildren. The brats perked up hearing this: special? More dough?

So the family ate and the adults talked while the kids played a game on their phones that entailed murdering and dismembering thuggish elves and putting a pistol to the head of Santa’s scantily-clad mistress. It was all in good fun, though.

The meal concluded. The brats were losing their minds in anticipation of the money. At last they gathered around the fake tree and Grandfather pulled out the cards from his back pocket. He handed them to the brats and they ripped the cards apart.

No green. No green! They stared up at Grandfather and their lips trembled. They stared up at their parents. The parents were mystified. Grandfather told them to read the cards. They read the cards and didn’t bother holding back their disappointment. The gifts were in the garage. Go out and get them. What the hell? No cash! The old codger probably bought us a tent or sleeping bag! Forget that! We don’t camp!

Out to the garage the brats skulked and sulked. Grandfather and parents followed. The son had a feeling his father was up to some Christmas mischief like those incidents he pulled when the son was growing up. These pranks always proved memorable.

Grandfather directed the brats to an area where the rakes leaned up against a wall. The cart was right beside them. The grandchildren were confused. They’d never seen a rake before and didn’t know what was happening. They felt a loosening in their bowels, but hung on and clenched tight. The son knew what was happening. He right then and there had a casual epiphany that revealed he and his wife had been terrible parents in the formative years of their children’s lives.

The grand kids remained frozen. Grandfather grabbed the rakes and held them up. These are for raking leaves. He handed the rakes to the grand kids. They took them like they were sticks of dynamite with the fuses lit. They didn’t know what to do, so Grandfather asked for the boy’s rake. He demonstrated proper hands position and expert raking motion, then handed it back to the boy. The grandchildren took up their rakes. Then Grandfather said they should all go out to the yard. It was time for a job. The son rolled the cart out and his wife followed him in silence.

They all went out of the garage and stood in a circle on the mattress of leaves. In fact, a few strays were falling at that very moment, the last ones of the season. Grandfather asked for the girl’s rake. This is how you rake leaves. He demonstrated and raked some leaves into a pile. Once we rake them up into piles, we load them into the cart and dump them out in the street. The city comes along and picks them up.

The grandchildren looked at him in disbelief. They were ready to bawl. Grandfather told them the rakes and cart were their Christmas presents, useful tools for a job that he would pay each of them $150 an hour to perform, if their performance met his high standards of leaf raking and disposal. He figured the yard would need roughly three hours of raking. The weather was perfect and the offer was only good for this day.

$150 an hour! We’re in the money!!

Grandfather asked if they wanted the job. They did. He told them to get work clothes and sneakers on and get back here in five minutes if they wanted a $50 bonus. They didn’t have any work clothes but they didn’t know that. They sprinted away screaming like Puritans at a witch burning.

The son was smiling. He didn’t say a word to his father. He did tell his wife he had to make a quick trip to the big box retailer to pick up something. This being capitalist America, the store would naturally be open on Christmas Day and paying their employees an extra 15 cents an hour.

Christmas Rakes (Part 2)

Fiction, NSP Meditations

In recent years, the holiday tradition developed that Grandfather visited the family for Thanksgiving and Christmas. He used to host the family at the farmhouse with a real tree and a turkey cooked in the oven, but the kids bitched privately to their parents that Grandfather didn’t have any Wi-Fi and they didn’t want to go there anymore so now it was games on tablets around the table and a pre-cooked turkey with all the pre-cooked trimmings purchased from a swank market. Oh Joy!

Another tradition had developed for the family. Grandfather used to pick out thoughtful gifts for the grand kids, like tool boxes, rain jackets and bicycles, but they were all a bust and the parents suggested Grandfather nix the presents and dispense cold hard cash in a nice card. It would be easier on him and the kids could put the dough toward more gadgets. He agreed and the amount gradually rose over the years until this Christmas it stood at $300 a brat.

Thanksgiving arrived. Grandfather showed up early as he always did, and drank a dark beer while watching the Lions getting blown out on television. The grand kids came down to greet him when he showed up, but then raced back up to their rooms to separately watch movies.

The parents toiled in the kitchen. Grandfather stood up from the couch and walked over to the big window that overlooked the yard. He couldn’t believe how high the leaves had piled up. They were practically shin high! It was a lazy home owner’s disgrace! The grass was going to die!

Grandfather strolled into the kitchen and casually mentioned how good everything looked outside. The son said he needed to get the leaves hauled away but he couldn’t find a service. The Pandemic, you know. No one wanted to work anymore. Yeah, no one wanted to work anymore! thought Grandfather. Like my two grand kids! They should get off their asses and rake up the damn leaves!

Grandfather excused himself and said he was going to take a little walk before the feast. He donned his his coat, went out the door, and started walking down the sidewalk. He passed the garage to the house and stopped. He turned around, moved forward, opened a gate, walked into the yard, and onto a mattress of leaves. He found a door to the garage and entered. Automatic lights popped on overhead. He surveyed the interior of the garage and could not believe his eyes—not a single yard tool. Not even a broom! There wasn’t even a leaf blower because no one in the house would ever deign to operate one.

A quiet fury, then disillusion crept into Grandfather. He left the garage and began walking down the sidewalk. He needed to clear his head and think. There was no way he was giving those brats more cash for Christmas! You had to be a good boy or girl for Santa to deliver the bounty. That was the rule.

Then Grandfather had a Grinch moment like when Grinch heard Whoville singing after he’d ransacked their Christmas. His heart grew and grew. He felt great empathy for his grand kids. They needed help and mentoring. They needed a good country belt lickin’ as well, but that was from another era.

A super great Christmas notion walloped Grandfather! It bowled him over. But it all depended on his son, sister, and his grand children doing absolutely nothing about the leaves from Thanksgiving until Christmas. Grandfather laughed. It was in the bag!

He returned to the house, ate his meal, and drank a couple more beers while watching the Cowboys game by himself on the couch. The Cowboys, his favorite team, lost on a last second field goal, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Grandfather was braving Black Friday madness in person tomorrow and buying real gifts for his grand kids. The days of cash were over.

It was hardly Black Friday madness for Grandfather. He drove seven minutes to the Estacada hardware store, about the last business on Main Street that wasn’t boarded up, walked inside, said hello to the store’s owner, a man he had known his entire adult life, ambled down an aisle, turned right, then left, and there they were! Rakes! Rakes! Rakes! He selected two old school models with wooden handles and metal tines. No plastic for my kin! The brats must hear the soothing sound of metal trilling through grass! He also picked out a push cart with fat rubber wheels. He was paying cash at the counter when he saw the section of dangling work gloves, complete with some real leather beauties. He thought about throwing them in to complete the concept gift, but then at the last moment changed his mind: screw it! Let my grand kids get blisters!

The owner of the hardware store inquired: two rakes? You’re only one old man. Grandfather erupted in laughter like a bowl full of jelly. He told the owner to throw in the backpack leaf blower advertised in the window, too. He hated those infernal machines manufactured by Satan, but he had another great Christmas notion that, well, needed a Satan for execution.

His Black Friday took all of ten minutes and kept most of the money in Estacada. Now all he had to do was wait for Christmas and pray it didn’t rain. And pray he did.

Christmas Rakes (Part 1)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , ,

A wealthy nuclear family lived in a large home in the fashionable and historic neighborhood of Sellwood in Portland. The woman worked in health care billing. The man worked in tech. There was a boy, age 10, a girl, age 11. They were spoiled brats, but not in the classic snotty sense. They were part of the new generation of spoiled brats who didn’t enact traditional bratty behavior. Their quietly obnoxious behavior manifested itself in a total refusal to do anything to help around the house or yard. They had no chores, no responsibilities. They were sluggards, snot-nosed, sloths. They never ventured outside or goofed around in the park or bicycled past the homeless encampment two blocks away. Indeed, the bicycles hung on the wall in the garage and hadn’t been ridden in years.

They had no life outside of the internet.

At one point, years ago, the parents had instructed the kids to take out the trash or dust the furniture, but they did the work so poorly and then not at all, and the parents finally gave up. The kids were so indifferent to anything except their digital gadgetry that they forgot to feed their hamsters and the hamsters starved to death. The kids didn’t cry.

The house sat on a double lot. There was a fancy outdoor kitchen, fire pit and home theater. In the yard, grew towering maples, oaks and a cherry tree that hosted a half dozen squirrels. In the spring, the trees held a million beautiful leaves. In the fall, they dropped them on the lawn.

Simple enough to get rid of them. Call in the Latino laborers to do it. Or perhaps even hit up a homeless man with a $20 bill and a fifth of Old Crow and let your kids watch from the window to see how charitable the family is as the holiday season rolls around.

But this fall was different. The Pandemic had upended the world of work and the family couldn’t find a service to remove the leaves. The homeless weren’t interested, either, even for more money and better booze.

So the leaves piled up.

Thanksgiving arrived and Grandfather came to dinner. He was an interesting man, and his son was definitely not a chip off the old block. Grandfather lived in an old farmhouse on 40 acres outside of Estacada, roughly 20 miles southeast of Portland. In other words, rural Oregon.

He’d been a high school social studies teacher and football coach at the local junior high for 30 years. He wasn’t all that dynamic a teacher or a successful coach, but he was a kind and decent man and cared for his students, particularly when Estacada’s timber economy bottomed out and then disappeared forever.

After retiring, he remained in the area and expected to live many more happy years with his wife. Then she came down with cancer, died quickly, and he was alone on the property.

It was then that Grandfather had choices. Drown in grief and hit the sauce. Turn on Fox News and become deranged. Or continue to engage with the world in positive fashion as he had as a husband, parent, teacher, coach and citizen of Estacada. He did, after all, have a son, a daughter in-law and grandchildren, a family to live for and support in some material and emotional fashion. Thus, he chose engagement and didn’t let his mind or body or property go to seed.

Now about his only child. He was a middling athlete and went on to earn a degree in computer science at Oregon State University. He got a Portland job writing software that his father didn’t really grasp, a job that did absolutely nothing to enrich the world beyond enriching corporations. He was a nice man, kind of feckless, who married a blasé woman he’d met online. They brought the aforementioned brats into existence and bought a dream home in Sellwood.

The couple and the brats paid a visit to the farmhouse every now and then, but the older they got, the less they came. Grandfather had tried interesting the grand kids in work around the farmhouse, but they were utterly indifferent and fell down a lot. The son hadn’t been like that growing up. He performed all manner of chores around the property, from splitting wood to mowing fields. He liked it, but surely didn’t pass this trait on to his children. They’d never done a lick of manual labor in their lives. That was for other kids in Sellwood, and of course, the other kids never did a lick of yard work in Sellwood, either. Just walk the neighborhood when the leaves start falling and you’ll learn that.

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