8:00 in the morning. Rain and wind whipped the city. Light in the sky began to emerge. Day two of the new year.

I sat in the car with my new dog Elmer, a husky I’d adopted from the county shelter four days ago. We were waiting in the parking lot for the vet’s office to open. The office stood one block off SE 82^nd, one the severe crisis areas of urban homelessness in Oregon.

A dozen crows perched on a power line. A gull flew overhead. A row of stunted oaks hadn’t dropped their leaves. An occupant of a home came out to empty the trash. I heard sirens and horns honking.

Elmer and I waited for his appointment to get a routine checkup and schedule his neutering. He slept on the back seat while I stared out the window and watched a van, sedan, RV and a tiny trailer serve as domiciles. All were shattered, battered and parked on a dead end street behind a massive Asian restaurant smeared with illegible graffiti. (Hey, say something interesting, even political!) The RV was covered in shredded and fraying blue tarps that weren’t properly secured. They billowed in the wind like sheets on a …clothesline?

No.

Flags. They looked like forlorn and torn and mold-streaked American flags flying over government buildings administered by government employees who don’t give a shit. I see it all over Oregon, but mainly in the rural communities who claim they love the flag more than the people in the big cities.

The billowing tarps jolted me. I began riffing in my journal on the soiled, shredded and fraying blue tarps flying above a domicile for the homeless, flying haphazardly without grace, almost as if insane.

I wouldn’t say the flag is flying. More like writhing in terrible pain.

The flag is neither flying upright or backwards. There is no distinction between those two extremes with this flag.

At any moment it could tear away, take to the wind, then fall somewhere to the ground. It might be re-purposed as covering, shelter, a body bag, or end up in the garbage.

I see these grimy and grounded flags all the time: streets, sidewalks, alleys, forests, dunes, parking lots. I even see some stuck in the branches of trees or snagged in the willows along creeks.

For anyone who has ever tried securing a load in a truck with a tarp, you know: it’s difficult. There is an art and mechanics to it. That’s why you see so many tarps ready to fly away (or flown away) from loaded trucks rolling down the roads and highways. They were secured by amateurs.

I suspect homeless people have become the greatest tarp securers in American history, if that counts for anything, and I think it does.

These flying and grounded blue tarps appear to me as the official unofficial flags of American homelessness.

Once these tarps protected prized possessions from the elements: a boat, bicycle, barbecue. Now they protect unprized people living outdoors.

Elmer was in perfect health! We headed for home but not before I drove by the flag for closer inspection. I took a photograph of it. It blew up and down and sideways. It slapped against the side of the RV and made a very unusual sound. It was nothing like the sound a flag in the wind makes when slapping a flagpole.

Elmer the husky barked his boredom.

The squirrels slid on the ice chasing peanuts.

I stepped outside to test the footing down to yard. I slipped on the stairs and fell on my ass. Nothing damaged.

A homeless man wearing a backpack walked down the middle of the street at six in the morning. Where in the world was he going in the ice at this time?

I read the Washington Post online.

I read a Michael Chabon novel.

I drank cold coffee.

I watched the local news weather reports.

I wondered where my great collaborator has gone.

The forecast calls for an afternoon melt.

I do my very best Jimmy Carter impression and wear a sweater and keep the thermostat at 63 degrees. Just imagine a President asking people to turn down the heat and wear a sweater in the great cause of energy conversation. It will never happen again because look what happened to Carter. It was all Tip O’Neil’s fault. He fucked Carter over and we got Reagan and look what happened to America.

A few vehicles pass. People have to get to work. They have to help care for my dad in assisted living or open the convenience stores. Front line heroes the politicians called them during the pandemic. All but forgotten now. The politicians didn’t even raise the federal minimum wage.

I listened to the morons on sports radio. They are the dumbest high paid men and women in America.

I wondered how my homeless friend Mark made out during the storm.

Icicles hung from the gutters.

A light snow fell. I watched it from inside a coffee shop across the street from Dad’s assisted living center. Elmer the husky was snoozing in the car, doubtless dreaming of ways to make more mischief in my life.

The front door rattled open. An elderly man with long hair entered using a walker while wearing a bulging backpack over a neon green safety jacket. I recognized him as Marvin, a homeless man from the neighborhood who often drinks a coffee and eats a baked good in the mornings, typically courtesy of staff or a patron. He’s a quiet man, polite, and usually sits alone in the corner and stares straight ahead. I have never seem him with a phone.

The last time I observed him, he didn’t use a walker.

Marvin walked himself to the right of me and down an incline to an area where two men drank coffee and talked. They exuded the appearance of retired, well-to-do men from the neighborhood.

As soon as they saw Marvin they bolted up, greeted him, and moved into action. One man invited Marvin to join them; the other helped him remove the backpack. They took his coffee and baked goods order and one of the men hurried to the counter to place it. He returned a minute later and the three men began talking. I eavesdropped from above them, but didn’t catch much except Marvin answering the question: where are you sleeping in the cold? “Anywhere I can.”

A barista announced the coffee and baked good order was ready. One of the men bounded off the couch to retrieve it. He brought it to Marvin. Marvin thanked him, slung the backpack over the walker, rigged up the coffee and baked good (a muffin, I think) for transport and wheeled himself to his usual corner of the coffee shop. He sat down, extricated the coffee and baked good, and began drinking and eating by himself.

It was time for me to go. I stood up and said to the two men, “I saw what you did for Marvin. Your act of kindness really got to me. Thank you for doing it. I notice these things.”

One of the men said, “Thank you. We’ve known Marvin for a while.”

I left. The snow was picking up. So was the cold. One of the men made eye contact with me through the glass and nodded. We were of the same mind. There are millions of us helping or wanting to help the homeless. How can our massive but independent, uncoordinated caring better be harnessed? How can we do more than coffee and a muffin? Sure, it’s a start, but we must go deeper and begin more structural efforts.

Where is the leadership to guide us?