My Joie de Vivre Went for a Walk and Got Lost

When I came out of the liquor store, I saw my husband leaning on my car with his arms folded. I carried a six-pack of beer, which was the devil to get because I wanted just plain old Miller and not some jacked up micro-brewed business and had to stand on the rim of the cooler and reach up while holding a big bottle of Yellow Tail. It was precarious. I’d have thought the man who was staring at the low-priced beer, transfixed, might interrupt his study to help me but, no, he just stood back and added my struggle to his screen shot.

Old lady could drop the bottle and the six-pack, spreading a lethal mixture of cheap wine and cheaper beer everywhere. Motherfuckers, I think. Why don’t they put the affordable stuff where a person can reach it? I think this remembering the meeting with our financial advisers last week and the critical numbers put in (parentheses). If you know nothing else, know this. Avoid numbers embraced by parentheses. Our heirs will thank us for our tasteless frugality.

I saw him across the street, then noticed his truck up the street. There is that, I think. I’m married to a guy who would see my car outside a liquor store and stop to chat. Then he asked for a ride the half-block to his truck.

It was nice but it didn’t help much.

I am awash in meaninglessness.

It’s temporary. If I know nothing else from living 69 years, I know this. Both crummy times and good times are temporary. You can’t count on either lasting; both breathe their own air and don’t care what you want or do. They come and go like the flu. Just don’t do anything drastic, I tell myself. Have a bowl of cereal and go back to work.

I’m working on a big funding proposal about homelessness. I answer the questions asked – about length of time homeless and returns to homelessness – and I remember the homeless guys at the corner who pulled my son out of his burning car a few months ago and I think, who the fuck cares about any of this? Would those guys meet the government’s metrics? Would they be considered successful homeless people? I don’t know. Fuck the government. Fuck making an industry around people being homeless. Just have decent wages and affordable places to live. Then we don’t have to have folks homesteading underneath bridges. For Christ’s sake.

In Houston, families are sitting on their roofs waiting for rescue. They are wet and hungry and sitting in the dark. Strangers from other towns motor by in boats and load them up, take them to shelter where there are sandwiches and dry clothes. The kids play ping pong while their parents watch, grateful they are not holding hands and drowning.  Which is what could have happened if a stranger hadn’t happened by with a boat.

I understand this. I know my place.

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Photo by Paul Dufour on Unsplash