It was a weekday afternoon and Dad and I were conversing about America’s obsession with guns and how the 2^nd Amendment is the worst written sentence in American history. We then began discussing death and our culture’s various hang ups to dignified endings of life in old age, and he quoted the entirety of Tennyson’s poem, “Crossing the Bar.”

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

I had never read the poem before and hearing it astonished me because it captures perfectly my sentiments about death and maybe one day from now I’ll read it, or someone will read it, or a hologram of Tennyson will read it, and then, Hart’s Cove here I come! There is no bar to cross there, but it’s the ocean all the same.

After that, Dad and I moved on to the homeless issue, which has become the chief subject of conversation whenever my family gets together.

Somehow Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son came up and Dad recalled that after the son squandered his inheritance on “riotous living” (King James Version) he worked in a pigpen feeding “swine.” but his employer wouldn’t feed him. Essentially, the son was homeless but when he returned he was welcomed by his father and a feast was held, something that enraged the prodigal son’s hard working brother.

I said the Prodigal Son parable didn’t really apply to the homeless because most of them probably didn’t have rich fathers to return to after losing or squandering (there is a difference) everything. Dad said that was true but the parable’s lesson was far greater than that. Jesus was suggesting that we the citizenry are collectively the father and we should welcome the return of anyone who has lost their way and become destitute or troubled.

Next up was the poet Edward Markham and Dad quoted the beginning stanza of Markham’s poem “The Man with the Hoe.”

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.

Who made him dead to rapture and despair,

A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,

Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

I looked it up and he was right! He was also right about the French painting of a man with a hoe had inspired the poem. The name of the painter was Millet! How had he pulled that one out?

Dad the informed me that Edward Markham was from Oregon City, my hometown. Then it flashed on me that there is a plaque outside the Oregon City library that commemorates Markham and that this poet was practically a socialist in this great soaring poem and I wish I learned about him in my youth.

You want your heart broken as an Oregonian? Drive Highway 101 past the wondrous Steve Prefontaine mural in Coos Bay, the rugged area on the Southern Oregon Coast where he grew up. Drive past it slowly on a rainy morning in late May, and see two young men about Pre’s age when he was becoming an American distance running legend and a modern Oregon folk hero, see them asleep or passed out in sleeping bags, on concrete, in a tiny public plaza with potted flowers, benches and picnic tables, surrounded by their scattered possessions. They rest at the base of a 40-foot high triptych mural of the greatest sports figure in Oregon history, a god, a colossus, a myth, who came to life and pumped psychic corpuscles into all our bodies and minds for those of us who knew his story.

The splayed and frayed young men may or may not have read an immortal quote from Pre that adorns the mural: “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.”

The gift. Your unique gift.

Yes, that will break your Oregon heart because you can’t comprehend how these two young men could end up sleeping or passed out in Pre’s hometown, on this particular public space honoring the smallish son of a logger who competed with indomitable fire, and at the age of 24 drove his sports car drunk into a giant Eugene rock and died in 1975.

What about these two young men? What are their gifts to the world? Is it too late for them to discover their gifts? Have they read the quote? Surely, they have. It’s three feet high! Can Pre still inspire young people with his story, his words, his relentless running, the way he attacked a race?

These young men wasted underneath this mural is the most awful Oregon juxtaposition you have ever seen, and you will never get it out of your mind. Nor do you want to. There is something to be learned from it and the next time you pass through Coos Bay, you will seek it out. You sense this effort might lead to the key of unlocking your understanding of the New American Diaspora.

I wrote a thousand words on three of Studs Terkel’s books.

I wrote 500 words on recycling my high school yearbooks and lamenting the loss of industrial arts classes.

I took a walk through a homeless encampment and park.

I watched an episode of Perry Mason.

I went grocery shopping.

I mailed two of my books to a customer in Michigan.

I cashed my monthly royalty check earned from a 1/32^nd ownership share of an Oklahoma oil and natural gas field. (Payment has tripled since the Russian invasion of Ukraine so I can add war profiteer to my resume.)

I bicycled past a man standing in a homeless encampment. He was holding an acoustic guitar. I stopped and bicycled back to him. I asked him if he would play a song and said I would pay him if he did. He agreed. He played an original metal song called “Euphoric Forest” that astonished me and I gave him a 20-dollar bill. This was the beginning of a half hour conversation that has entirely changed the course of my writing project about the homeless. Just when you think it’s over and know all you need to know…a homeless rocker living in a tent camper surrounded by stuff shreds a metal song on an acoustic guitar and everything is upended.

Shit, that’s what rock and roll is supposed to do! Hadn’t I declared rock dead 25 years ago?

Mark from the Old Crow Book Club was sitting on the sidewalk reading one of the Dune sequels and malt liquoring. He was assigned watch over friends’ possessions while they trudged off to redeem a stash of cans and bottles. One carried a bag like Santa on Christmas Eve. The other pulled a toy wagon with a load the size of Grinch’s loot ripped off from Whoville.

I was walking home from a coffee shop and stopped to chat. I don’t recall what prompted Mark to tell me the following story and it doesn’t matter. What matters is its documentation for the sporadic record of one homeless man’s highly eccentric or quite possibly normal life in the midst of the New American Diaspora.

Mark told me he got laid on his birthday a few weeks ago. He used the word “laid.”

I burst out, “What?!!!!!!”

“Yeah,” he said, “a one night stand.”

I assumed it was a liaison with a homeless person in the neighborhood and said as much to him.

Mark flashed me a semi sinister smile and said it was with a woman who owned a nice home in our tony neighborhood. She had recently broken up with her boyfriend. She had previously met Mark while he was collecting cans and bottles. He regularly collected hers and they formed a friendship of sorts…and then he was in her bed on his birthday!…but couldn’t “perform” because he’d drank too much goddamn Old Crow and three cans of malt liquor beforehand.

“What?” I said, “I thought you said you got laid.”

“I guess I didn’t,” said Mark. “She did let me take a shower and she was nice in the shower.”

What???!!??!?!?!? Did I believe him?

Yes.

“Are you telling me,” I said, “that homeless people around here are occasionally having sex with people living in houses in the neighborhood?”

“Yes,” he said. “More than you would think. Some of them like it dirty.”

We both laughed at that!

“I’ll be dirty for them,” he added.

And we laughed at that, too.