Three Hug Friday Round-Up

The city police ticketed homeless people camped at a commuter lot and then said, “oops,” as if they were actually sorry but what they’re sorry about is their strategic error, not their intent. It’s too long to explain, but there are people in Milwaukee living in tents and RV’s at commuter lots which is distressing to see, distressing in different ways depending on how you feel about homeless people. Anyway, police made a big show of their intent to boot people last night only to retract the threats this morning. It’s always a great policy to cause great fear and anxiety among people who are already homeless. Especially in the winter. Especially when there are no shelter beds and there are no warming rooms open. So, I’m awed by that – what is it, heartlessness?

At a meeting this morning in a senior center, I casually asked if there was coffee anywhere. And in minutes there was a coffee pot, creamer, sugar, and cups brought in and put on the table, all obviously having been scrounged from around the building, and I thought, it would have been okay to have said no, sorry, but instead the instinct was to create coffee, which to me is hospitality. And then I wanted to drink three cups of coffee just to show my appreciation.

Yesterday, while I was eating lunch with friends, a man walked up to me who I had not seen in nearly thirty years. By the time I left the lunch place, I’d hugged this man three times, the last, whispering in his ear, “Some people are so meaningful.” It’s not possible to explain.

My bilateral cochlear implant life is going okay. People ask how I’m doing and I say okay because I always say okay. And then I try to explain how sounds in the new ear are tinny, like people would know what that means, and that my brain is still trying to weave the connection between my two ears. I don’t tell them that while I am grateful for the eighteen new electrodes in my left cochlea, hearing is still work. A woman wearing a mask standing several yards away asked me a question over and over again yesterday and I wanted to hold up a sign that said “Don’t talk to me. Whatever you’re saying is too much trouble for me to hear.” It’ll get better.

I’m wanting to write a story called “Prison Town.” But it would be in a man’s voice and that gives me pause. I just finished a story about a man fishing with his daughter which I wrote from the dad’s point of view but it felt comic-book like – you know, how a typical dad would talk. Writing it made me realize how divorced I am from a man’s internal life, how a man thinks about things, so I fall back on a man’s perspective just being a couple of degrees tougher than my own. I think there’s more to it than that.