how old are you now

tuesday 18 january 2011
turners troglodytes

How old? As old as glacial ice. As old as nightmares. As old as ignorance, and a teaching of Socrates: always quesion.

It's 6:35 in the morning, and we are having a weather. I've already spent seventy minutes in the dark morning at the river, trudging through the snow, looking at swans, listening to ice-sounds, being snowed upon, wiping tears. Trying to look at snow crystals with my new magnifying glass, which is apparently not a strong enough model, though it was the strongest our drugstore had. Didn't take my glasses. Thought I wouldn't need them with the magnifier, but guess I do.

And I was there last night as well. Before the snow began, while the one-hair-off-full moon was staring down, while the swans were closer to the shore, and therefore larger in my eyes. Whistling my long-established song for water birds, wiping the same tears. They are always the same tears.

Since my way of life and everyone I love was taken from me in March of 2008, I have had three ugly, alien, burning birthdays. I say sardonically that they have been adventures in barrenness, adventures in abandonment, adventures in emptiness. Let me say yet again that my eviction was illegal, and again that I always paid my rent, and again that I had a huge social service dinosaur that was supposed to prevent the homelessness, and say that they sat on their brains and their hearts, and did nothing.

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On the first, turning 56 in 2009, I was living in a hell-hole of a shelter in Norhampton Mass. Run by ServiceNet. I've stayed in two different ServiceNet shelters, and they were both hell-holes. This would lead me to conclude that ALL homeless shelters are hell-holes, if it weren't for the fact that I stayed in one in New Hampshire that was a lot better.

It started snowing the night before my birthday, and was still snowing vigorously in the morning. It was a Sunday, and on Sundays we had an overnight worker at the shelter who tried to be a kinder, gentler shelter worker. Normal kick-out time in the mornings was seven, but Riley would let us stay in as late as ten, if she had no pressing things to do in her personal life. Especially if there was weather. She let us stay in on my birthday. But I didn't take much advantage of that grace. Horrible, ugly as the birthday was, I figured I at least deserved a nice breakfast after everything I'd been going through for ten homeless, loveless months; and I had no intention of eating my birthday breakfast at a freaking shelter.

I ate it at Kathy's diner. Eggs and pancakes and bacon, if memory serves. I hung there as long as I dared for the money I'd spent, though Kathy never said anything. Maybe till 9:00 or so. This is your lifestyle when you board at a shelter that does not stay open all day. You are kicked out in the morning and let back in at suppertime. In between you hang. And this costs money, because you just can't hang in an eatery for hours without buying something. I would generally hang at one place for up to three hours, then I'd move on to another and spend more money eating things I didn't want. All the eatery people know who the shelter ones are: they're the ones who hang and hang and spend as little as possible. There is endless, meaningless hanging. And for me there was in this hanging, as in so much else about homelessness, endless shame.

There's no clear memory of where I hung until lunch time, after I left Kathy's. Bruegger's Bagels is the most likely place, so that must be where I went. I wanted to buy myself a set of art pencils in the art store, but I had to wait for them to open at 11 or 12. I also wanted a carnation, but the florist wasn't opening till late either. Carnation is the flower for January birthdays, but I wasn't buying it for my own sake. I wanted it for a birthday that had been the day before mine, the birthday of three loved friends. I remember sitting on a bench on the sidewalk outside the art store, burning a stick of Nag Champa and smelling the carnation, wiping those famous tears. The snow had slowed a great deal by late morning, but I sat there with incense and flower and cigarette and snow, simmering shame and loneliness, grief and rage, while I painted on myself a phony placid face.

For lunch I further treated myself to sweet and sour chicken at the Teapot. I sat alone at a table in front of the window, staring out at Main Street as if there were anything of interest or meaning to see out there, when I already knew full well that there wasn't.

The shelter wouldn't open again until 6:OO, and it was probably only 1:30 when I finished lunch. I felt I'd already spent enough money that day. Where was I going to hang that was free. No library on Sundays. Only the laundromat.

And so I hung in a drab, messy laundromat on the day I turned 56, staring out the large windows, thinking about my REAL birthdays, the ones in the life that had been stolen from me, wiping more tears. Eventually I needed a bathroom, went off in search of such, bought yet another cup of tea, and back to the laundromat for the duration. The sun had come out weakly after the storm, and I watched it go down on the birthday, watched the dusk and the beginning of the blue point. Tried several times to reach an acquaintance in Greenfield on the phone, but she never answered. The darkest shade of blue comes, the day is on the brink of night, and it's back to the hell-hole I go.

Later I lay me down to sleep in the bottom of a bunk bed; lunatics, alcoholics, addicts, criminal recitivists all wheezing to their creepy beds around me. Not one human being -- no relative, no so-called friend, -- had called me on my birthday. As on many, many nights, I made a birthday wish to die quickly, quietly in my sleep.

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In 2010 I became 57. Living in a rented bedroom in Greenfield. Infinitely better than any shelter, but not without its hardships, and not without its shames. One hardhsip was that I wasn't allowed any space in the kitchen to store food, or any use of the stove and microwave. All my meals had to be composed of things I could keep unrefrigerated in my room, or gotten out. This birthday was supposed to be less bleak than the one before. My friend was going to bring me to Turners to visit some places my animals and I had loved, and then we were going to her place for supper and movies. And I had my new guinea pig, so I was not completely without animal life or completely without companionship in my rented room. Did that lessen the grief and rage for the fourteen animals who were stolen and killed? Not one iota. But it did make a very small dent in the loneliness.

The morning was my own -- my friend never got up and running until early afternoon. It didn't snow, but was instead a bright, fresh January day with former snow already on the ground. I had planned on that morning to walk to the hotel in Greenfield where I had walked and medicated my dogs for the last time. That walk took me forty minutes each way, made a good exercise binge. But when the day came, I woke with an attack of palindromic rheumatism in my legs. Walking was a study in stiffness and pain and joints swelled with fluid.

It wasn't going to steal my memory walks from me. Not the walk to the hotel, and not the shorter walks I would take in Turners. I took prednisone. I took what felt like pounds of aspirin. About 11:15 I set off. When I reached the hotel parking lot, I did my ritual. Found the parking space where the van had been; the van with all my animals inside. Found the spots where I let the dogs do their potty. Found the place where we stood when I gave them their pills and some canned food dished out on the pavement. After forty minutes of walking, the attack was much worse. I was breathing hard from the pain.

I dragged myself into Dunkin Donuts for a late breakfast and some sitting down. I was having trouble getting my voice up because of the pain, but on the second try, my order was heard. After the food I needed to pee, and in my efforts to raise myself from the chair and start walking to the ladies, my body started heading for the floor. I caught myself before the fall was complete, but not before a man came over to me and asked me if I was okay. I lied and said I was just a little stiff. Stiff drunk, they all thought. I could see it in their faces.

On the trek back, I found Matthew Lacoy squatting in front of the health food store. Not unusual. We saw each other from a great distance, as we most often do, and he watched my every tread, as he most often does. When I passed him -- hauling my almost non-functional legs and huffing with the pain -- I glanced at him only briefly. This Matthew, who, according to his own mouth, is an undercover agent who loves me, had not one word to say to me on my birthday, not one word to say to my obvious physical pain, though he watched every step I took for blocks. I glanced at him only briefly. If looks could kill, I would have killed him then and there.

Just minutes after I passed by this agent in love, my friend called me. It's party time, says she. Was I ready to come over. I wanted to know if we could have going to Turners as the first activity so that I could then sit down for the rest of the day. I've looked at my finances, says she, and I'll take you to Turners if you want to give me some gas money. I fumed into the winter air. She had already told me two days before that she would take me to Turners and that it would be a birthday present. The distance between the center of Turners and the center of Greenfield is something like five miles. How many drops of gasoline are we talking about in a four-cylinder Subaru? This friend had already ruined both Christmas and New Year's by acting like a bitch constipated full of sulphuric stinking crap, and now it looked as though she'd got the same plug in her anus for my birthday. Just as on Christmas and New Year's, I refused to play the passive-aggressive game, the meanness game. If she couldn't be kind on my birthday, be an actual friend, keep her word, then I wasn't going to play. I'd damned well stay in my room with my crippling pain and swelling, and my guinea pig who loved me. I don't see why I have to pay for something you said was a birthday present, I say. But I hadn't checked my finances when I said that. She says the word finances as if we're talking stocks and bonds here. She lives on the exact same monthly disability pittance that I do. I tell her to forget it, and to forget the birthday. I hang up on her and go back to my room.

Mostly I am conked out until supper time. Between the pain and the new dose of pills, I finally thud-bump into some sleep. After sleeping and sweating, the attack is less severe, and I'm able at 5:00 to walk to the free poor people's meal at one of the churches. Eating my birthday supper with loons, alkies and addicts, yet again. More humiliation. I could have eaten at a restaurant, but I didn't want to spend anymore money that day. Walking back after the meal, I call my daughter. She doesn't answer. She won't return my call. She just about never does.

But I get to my room and she does call back. I think we talk about an hour. For most of it she's rather bitchy and snipey, but while it hurts, it's no great surprise. Even in the years when we lived together, she would always sabotage my birthday in any way she could.

I go to sleep with those other birthdays, the ones in my own stolen life. Seeing the same stolen faces and saying the same stolen names; wiping away the same grieving, raging tears.

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And now I've gone 58. Living in Turners again, the town where the memories of me and my animals are. The town that contributed to our demolition. Living in, not an apartment, not even an efficiency, but a space, as I've said before, the size of a ponystall. A space, as I've said before, that I wouldn't give a good-sized dog to live in. Claustrophobia niggles at my nerves and cells and emotions constantly. I made few plans for this year's birthday, and that was deliberate. I planned several of my memory walks, but due to another birthday storm, only two were possible. I had lunch at a bakery nearby. At four my one friend called, and later my daughter. No nasty stuff; she was pleasant the whole time.

The walks I couldn't do on the day itself got done the next day. The walks in the places that have a meaning and a presence and a history particular to me and mine. Those walks where I feel less distant, less dismally far removed from the life and the loves that were mine. If I had died in my sleep on birthday night, so be it. If I die that way tonight, I die with my hatred and my rage intact. My loathing for every single individual who had a hand in stealing and hiding my animals, who had a hand in killing them, who had a hand in making me and leaving me homeless, who has knowledge at this very moment of where and when those animals died, and will not tell me. If looks could kill, I'd waste you here and now. Many happy returns of the day.
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read... Braonwandering... Stolen stars...

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2010 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.