The Green Purse (Part 2)

Coos Bay, NSP Meditations

A day after I posted “The Green Purse” on my Substack newsletter and blog, an enterprising friend notified me that he had discovered some news about a Shannon McKeehan who had the middle name of Adair. I had made a mistake identifying her last name on the ID and therefore my previous online searches had turned up nothing and the incident described below occurred three weeks after I found the purse and concluded my online investigation.

A disturbance call along Cape Arago Highway in Coos Bay led to the arrest of a 44-year-old woman wanted on a parole warrant, authorities said. At 1:45 p.m. May 22, 2026, a Coos County Sheriff’s deputy was dispatched to a disturbance in progress in the area of 92444 Cape Arago Highway. When the deputy arrived, several people were contacted, including Shannon McKeehan, 44. A records check showed McKeehan had a valid warrant for her arrest from the Oregon State Parole Board. Authorities said McKeehan initially walked away on foot, but the deputy later located her in brush about a quarter mile north of the original location.

On May 23, I checked the Coos County Jail roster and Shannon was incarcerated with no release date scheduled. I emailed the jail that I was in possession of Shannon’s purse which contained an ID and personal letter to her that she probably wanted to retain. What should I do with the purse?

I never heard from the jail and Shannon was released on May 26.

The Poet

NSP Meditations, Poetry

The poet lived in a tree house in the woods,

with an ocean view.

She subsisted on a literary grant and nuts.

I was teaching school and writing about rain.

She framed her poems with steel girders,

breathing life into them

with language of cirrus clouds.

She was seeking to fathom with her poetry,

but they were unfathomable to me

at a noisy open mic

where we met on a blind date.

She didn’t seize the room.

She didn’t care.

This was walking the plank into survival.

Her son had died of SIDS several years ago.

No one else was around.

She buried his memory in a storage unit:

ashes, bassinet, mobiles.

She had stopped paying the bill.

Notices arrived. She didn’t respond.

When she read her poems to me,

I barely followed.

They were more obscure on paper.

They costumed her life.

Why do poets try to dazzle

with their slanting?

Why sly around the moment

you discovered your dead baby in a crib,

rattler still in hand,

and camouflage the moment in a labyrinth of fog?

She evinced no curiosity about my writing,

never read a word.

She asked without asking.

I paid $600 to cover arrears on the storage unit.

I paid another $600 for six more months.

She never defined this as a loan.

One night,

she cried in bed,

bleeding from our abortion.

She told me should could not get pregnant.

I believed her.

I slept on the floor holding my dying dog.

A euthanizing in the morning.

The grant was running out.

She wanted to move in,

birth a child; I’d support her.

Years later,

she sent me a poem.

I understood this one.

I apologized and sent her

a $7500 lithograph

of black rain,

like the rain that strafed her tree house.

Call her poem a castigation

of my character,

relayed in right angles,

built like a jungle gym.

If still in my possession,

I would have let it conclude this poem.

The Green Purse

Coos Bay, NSP Meditations

Wind had wedged a tattered black and white umbrella under a huge piece of charred driftwood covered with graffiti, that upon previous readings, proved uninteresting.

Elmer and I were cruising our regular stretch of Coos Bay beach at 6:30 in the morning. Low tide exposed acres of mud flats and the clam hounds would be digging soon.

The umbrella spooked Elmer so we gave it a wide berth. On our return leg, we approached the piece of driftwood from the other side and I noticed something resting near it, at precisely where high tide had reached six hours ago.

I investigated. I picked up a green zippered purse in excellent condition and opened it.

Everything dry and neatly arranged. I inventoried the contents without any extrication: toiletries, cosmetics, Leatherman tool, phone charger, drug delivery devices, plastic bag of cannabis, pens, a folded piece of paper with writing, and an Oregon ID. I observed only the face on the ID and vaguely recognized it as a homeless woman seen frequently around Empire the last six months. Much had happened to that face since the ID was issued, if indeed this was the same woman.

I could have removed the ID and learned the woman’s name and age, but did not. I zippered the purse and placed it atop the piece of driftwood. Maybe she would come searching for it. It also occurred to me that she purposely left the purse behind at high tide, right around midnight, and walked into Coos Bay for a private euthanasia of hypothermia. At least her family, if she had any, might know how her life ended.

A few months ago, I would have taken the purse with me, examined its contents thoroughly, and tried to find the owner. I had made three previous (unsuccessful) such attempts, two in Portland, the other Coos Bay.

Elmer and I walked away. Clam hounds were gearing up. The smell of cannabis drifted on the air. An osprey flew overhead with a writhing eel clutched in its beak.

Something has left me concerning the crisis of homelessness and the absence worries me.

The next morning, Elmer and I descended to the same bay beach. It was enveloped in fog—visibility less than a hundred yards. The osprey was feeding her chirping chicks in a nest constructed in a channel marker.

We approached the piece of the driftwood. The umbrella had disappeared. The purse had not. I picked it up, stuffed it inside a coat pocket, and Elmer and I performed our sandy shtick.

A couple hundred yards later down the beach, I sat down at a picnic table that had miraculously appeared here a month ago. Elmer sniffed around while I opened the purse and began a thorough inspection of the contents.

The woman’s name is Shannon Adair. (I use Shannon’s real name here in case someone searching for her online might happen across this newsletter/blog post. Perhaps they will contact me.)

Born October 7th, 1981. 5’3,” 123 pounds. Roseburg address. Anatomical donor. Issued October 2006. Expired 2014. Not a driver’s license.

I unfolded the piece of paper. The undated letter read:

Shannon

Good morning. Didn’t know it was so bad to answer the door. Not trying to harass you. Just need to talk. Shenna and Cynde have both been trying to get a hold of you. I have no way of getting a hold of you. I’ve called 20 times in the last few days to relay a message. He must really have something on you. The dope has won again. You are with another piece of shit.

I’m leaving today. Not sure where I’m going. The woman I’ve adored forever and loved so much is gone. I won’t bother calling or looking for you. Gone for good. Out of this shithole. Away from these reckless people.

Your daughters love you very much. Reach out to them. They need you. Don’t bring another man to Lilly’s graduation. It would hurt her bad.

I will always remember our great times together and our wonderful family. Oh how I miss it so so much.

You will always be on my mind. Love you forever and ever. You will always mean so much to me. We’ve gone through so much. I wish you could have loved me like I loved you.

Take care my love.

Be happy and keep smiling.

Love always Sean

Questions about Shannon and the purse fell like an avalanche on my mind, far too many to list here. Doubtless, the reader has many of the same questions.

Back home, I spent 15 minutes searching on the internet—nothing except advertisements to pay for public records and a possible presence on Facebook. I couldn’t probe the latter because I don’t belong.

Perhaps I will run into Shannon Adair and reunite her with the letter. She hung onto it for some reason, and to me that portends hope.

So, I guess I’m not done yet.

Yard Work

NSP Meditations, Poetry

Yard work began on the grounds of a Church of Christ where Dad preached.

A half acre of lawn, flower beds, trees, shrubbery.

Weeding, mowing, raking, clipping, pruning, aerating, thatching, seeding, sweeping, edging.

All labor by hand,

including pushing a flywheel mower

to the Moon and back.

Dad taught me how to work

and I went to work.

No radio.

My older sister never joined us.

Dad and I rarely worked together.

When we did, we never talked about Jesus,

probably sports or Vietnam.

Never about the silent unraveling

of our family due to him.

I never told him I became an atheist

after he baptized me on my tenth birthday.

Dad favored simple tools,

nothing newfangled.

One of his maxims: “Use the right tools for the job, or don’t try.”

His favorite tool: a rake with tines that trilled through the leaves.

We raked a million leaves together

with our unique system of gathering.

The beagle blasted through every pile.

We played football in those leaves.

Dad would float a pass over a pile.

I would lay out and snare it,

the beagle occasionally intercepting.

My favorite tool: the stand-up weed puller.

He paid me a nickel for every weed.

Weeds paid for all my football cards.

I organized them not by teams,

rather, the best names:

Butkus, Sixkiller, Hamburger, Grabowski.

Dad died last year.

I was there at the end.

I bought a house in Coos Bay

to escape his death,

with a wild, forsaken yard:

waist high grass, English ivy, blackberries, weeds galore.

My first morning,

I went to work

with the husky at my side,

with the same tools,

the same old technique,

except for classic country

on the radio.

Oregon Tavern Age: Sunday Afternoon

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

A women’s golf tournament in Mexico plays silently on multiple screens.

No music from the jukebox. Excellent!

OTA men discuss HVAC and jest about all the suckers attending church this Sunday afternoon.

Another OTA man suffering from an assortment of alcohol-abuse maladies sips his gin and tonic. He’s paler by the day. I give him six months to live if he doesn’t quit the sauce. He’s not quitting the sauce.

An OTA woman talks to the female OTA bartender about proper footwear for a minimum wage job in America caring for the elderly. The conversation ends and the woman walks her hound Sandy Lou out of the joint.

Three OTAs play the slots. An OTA man orders a tequila sunrise. I’ve never tasted one.

Silence reigns in here. I relish it.

Someone could keel over, croak, and no one would notice. The stuffed bobcat mounted on the wall above me exudes more life than the patrons.

An OTA man walks over to the jukebox and punches in some tunes: heavy metal from the 80s. Jesus, I don’t want that!

The semi-regular homeless OTA man, a regular in the joint, weaves past me and says hello. He’s loaded. But at least he didn’t walk into the beer cooler, mistaking it for the restroom, like the other day. Christ, he could have frozen to death in there. It would have been a week before anyone noticed.

Some Thoughts on My Poems About Homelessness

NSP Meditations, Poetry, Writing

I recently decided to publish a collection of my poems written over the last two decades and have been polishing the manuscript for several months. The book should come out this fall. I’ve never considered myself a poet, but many experiences of late present themselves as poems, not treatments of prose. So I just follow the call. I apply no theories to my poetry or any pre-conceived notions of craft. All my poetry emerges as sheer instinct. I want to be direct, lucid. The denizens of dive bars can read my poems without confusion; they might even relish them because they sometimes provide the subject matter.

The collection is organized into five categories, one of which is “Homelessness.” All 16 of the poems on the subject have appeared on my Substack newsletter New American Diaspora or Nestucca Spit Pres Meditations blog. None were submitted to regional and national reviews, journals or magazines that publish poetry. One was published in a Coos Bay zine that was primarily distributed in laundromats and street libraries.

When I collated all my poems about homelessness, arranged them (not chronologically) and read them multiple times to edit/polish, I was struck by the levity that surfaced in many of them via incidents of outrageous antics (with zero irony) that made me laugh when I observed them. Such as when a homeless man rode his bicycle handless while eating powered donuts from a box or when a homeless man wrote a haiku in mustard on a sidewalk.

Is levity the right tone for poetry about homelessness? Is there even an answer for that question? I just managed to find some light or dark comedy (not frivolity) in these moments and wrote exactly what I witnessed, never taking poetic license because I’ve never had to when writing about homeless men and women. It’s all right there in front of me, often a few feet away. I never have to search for precious obtuse metaphors, either, because mine are riding bicycles past me, eating corndogs, swilling from fifths of Southern Comfort, often pulling ingenious trailer contraptions to convey personal possessions and returnable cans and bottles. Some are even playing foosball in an encampment or barbecuing crawdads with a blow torch.

It has also occurred to me that if I don’t introduce some levity into these scenes of homelessness I encounter, I’d become too jaded to write anything about them. Finding this humor also helps dissipated my occasional frustration or anger related to these people.

And why can’t some poems make readers laugh? When is the last time you read a modern poem and laughed at a line or throughout the entire poem? I haven’t since I read some limericks on a restroom stall in a dive bar a decade or so ago.

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