It is a bright Sunday morning and I am writing this on paper from a picnic table in a grassy area near a creek with beavers in it. I can hear the creek flow behind me. I am not facing the creek, as most people would be if they were sitting here. I mean, who willingly sits with their back to a creek or river or bay of the ocean?

I am today. I chose this unconventional arrangement so I could sit and write while watching a homeless man and his dog living in a Honda SUV parked on a street under a towering cedar 50 feet away.

He’s been living this way for months. Always the same spot under the cedar. I think the dog is new because I’ve never seen it before and I walk or bicycle past here four or five times a week. I have seen him outside his car several times, talking to an older woman who lives in the big house next to the street where he parks. He parks on the side of her house, not in front. I caught a drift of their conversation one time, and it was something about if he needed water.

I saw the man barbecuing at eight in the morning on the Fourth of July, which is an odd time to be barbecuing, but especially on the Fourth of July. I didn’t celebrate the Fourth of July. This man living in a car did if barbecuing on the Fourth of July constitutes a celebration. I think it does.

What is one to make of that? It occurs to me that to truly make sense of the homeless issue requires the art of a great novelist, not a crusader, cop, preacher, sociologist, politician or quack therapist. Yes, it will take a great novelist with a massive scope of American life. It will take a new Dostoevsky and it can’t possibly be written in the first person. I need the novelist telling this unfathomable story to know everything and reveal to the reader why there are foosball tables in some of the homeless encampments.

Wouldn’t that kind of revelation demand the novelist too conduct extensive research? Did Dostoevsky conduct any research? I doubt it. He was his own research.

It’s a nice car, in fact, spotless on the outside. There isn’t a scrap of garbage around the car. The man, Black, somewhat elderly, has a nice face that clearly isn’t ravaged by drugs, insanity or living outdoors for a long time.

I am watching his face right now as I write this and thinking of something Rilke wrote when he was watching a poor elderly woman place her face into her open hands as she stood on a street corner in Paris, “When poor people are thinking, they shouldn’t be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.”

Does this hold true for homeless people? I have seen such people in the same condition as the woman Rilke described.

I try imagining this man’s life or future. What does he do all day? And what about the dog’s life? What did they do when it hit 115 degrees?

Why do I wait in such anticipation at this picnic table to see how he walks and walks with his dog, which are two different things? What do they sound like together? You can tell a lot about someone by eavesdropping on their conversations with their pets. Perhaps everything about someone.

You visit the Carnegie Library of your Oregon City youth, the one that underwent a substantial upgrade a while back. It used to be small and brick now it is large, and still brick but with glass, too. You thank that dead steel billionaire magnate for his philanthropy a century (and change) ago. This is what American billionaires used to do with their money to atone for their sins. Now they fly into space.

You consider your Oregon City youth and the hundreds and hundreds of hours spent in this library, reading sports biographies and military history, and also, a few years later, a little red hardback book about the human sexuality published in the 1950s, that you consulted when you thought you were going to have sex for the first time, but didn’t. A few of the books you’ve written are now on the shelves of the library of your youth. It was an interesting creative journey to have made that happen, but then again, every writer can say that.

After reading some old atlases and not finding any decent periodicals to peruse, you walk up the hill to the used bookstore whose proceeds support the library’s operation.. It opens in ten minutes so you decide to keep walking around and taking in a few sights connected to your personal history.

First, is the pharmacy, now turned real estate shop, that did not sell condoms back in 1981, so you and your girlfriend had to go to the only place in town that did sell them, the bowling alley. There, you and your girlfriend flipped a coin in the car to see who had to go inside, into the restroom, and slide the coins in the slot.

You also past the building of what used to be a church that you briefly attended in junior high. In the basement of this church, during a break from some youth group activity, you made out with a blonde girl slightly older and taller than you. She wore her hair in pigtails.

The nostalgia tour concludes, and you enter the bookstore and drift toward the classics. There, you find a book by Jack Kerouac, The Lonesome Traveler, that you’ve never read, and a collection of erotic tales by Anais Nin called Delta of Venus. You read its preface and learn that Henry Miller briefly wrote erotic tales in 1940 for a dollar a page for some anonymous New York client who paid Miller through some shifty bibliophile middleman. This story startles you because it surely ranks as one of the greatest obscure stories in the history of American literature. It makes you laugh because your write erotic tales for NOTHING but would certainly take a dollar page 80 years later just for kicks,

Now consider this: library, book about sex; pharmacy, no condoms; church basement, making out with pig tailed blonde Christian; used bookstore, Henry Miller writing erotica for a dollar a page and you write it for free.

What’s that kind of circle called?

I took a walk on a hot afternoon. Book Chat Man Mark was sitting on the shaded sidewalk near the convenience store—his usual spot to read, drink malt liquor and hold court with his friends. It is also the place where I routinely engage him about the book he is currently reading, including, recently, one of mine, The Great Birthright. He said he loved it.

There Mark was drinking his customary malt liquor and talking to three other homeless men. One sat near Mark. The other two stood. The sitting man was drinking a fifth of Old Crow. Presumably, he was sharing the bottle with the two standing men because it was half gone. Or maybe he was drinking the whole damn thing himself.

Mark greeted me warmly. I asked him if he’d spent the $20 gift certificate to the local bookstore I’d given him in appreciation for his reading my novel.

He had not. He was saving it and going to give his female friend first crack at it. She had her eye on a special Bible at the store.

Mark introduced me to his friends as The Author and they reacted like I was famous. He obviously had told them about me and finding my book in a street library and then me seeing him reading it while he waited to redeem cans and bottles.

The five of us then embarked on a very spirited conversation about the merits of finding random books in street libraries. Mark said he just knew that in the very near future he was going to find one that was going to change his life. I told him I feel like that all the time.

At some point, I was tempted to ask Mark and the men about their journeys to this sidewalk, but the timing didn’t seem right. Perhaps another time. Perhaps never. I still feel strange broaching this subject in the context of being a writer interested in their journeys. Mark seems like a born storyteller so I may need to get over it. Maybe pay or barter for his time.

I had to go. The men said goodbye and called me brother.

Oh really? Then why wasn’t I offered a belt off the Old Crow? We’re all literary men, right?