As if from a dream, I’ve just awakened to the fact that gardeners have captured my neighborhood. They are an occupying force of pickup trucks, mowers and leaf blowers. Don’t get me wrong, I like gardeners. Most in our area are friendly and conscientious, and they make the yards look beautiful. Lately, though, those beautiful yards are starting to look like plots in a peaceful cemetery.
Time to go. Not to escape the leaf blowers, but to run from my own mortality.
We moved to the suburbs for the kids. Safe streets for biking, good schools, lots of soccer fields, even a children’s theatre where they could be the stars of the show. Our neighborhood was great for them. They thrived. They left.
It turns out I can only stand so much pastoral tranquility. The kids kept the place hopping, but now all the silent beauty is a little depressing. I need some buzz.
There are plenty of places I visit that are buzzy. But mainly they’re far from friends and parents. I’m over thinking I can jet off to some exotic place and do my own thing and when I come back everything will be the same. So I have to find some nearby buzz. San Francisco, I think.
I don’t want to trade sidewalks bordered with flowers for ones blooming with the tents of homeless men and women, but that seems to be the trade I have to make.
The problem with great cities is the same thing that gives them energy: a diverse population swarming in a frenzy of activity, all kinds of activity, solid and sordid, beautiful and vile, inspiring and disheartening. I love the inspiring parts, not so much the disheartening ones.
I think it’s more than the obvious ugliness, the trash and heroine needles, that bothers me. It’s the lost lives that force themselves on me, into me. I can’t just see them and ignore them. I have to try to understand why. I have to try to solve it. Ask my children: I can’t resist trying to solve everyone’s problems.
Big city solutions aren’t simple, of course. People do what they do, and in our society, by and large, we let them, as long as what they’re doing isn’t hurting anyone.
This is where homelessness gets so tough. People have a right to be homeless. This means, by implication, that they have a right to sleep on a park bench, under a freeway overpass, perhaps in a sidewalk tent outside a local shop or restaurant.
California is home to one-fourth of the nation’s homeless. There are many more now than in the past. It’s apparent that we don’t know how to handle them. Are they our neighbors, who, were we in a small country town, we would try to help back on their feet, maybe even put up in a spare bedroom? Or are they dangerous people—mentally ill, addicted—whom we are afraid of and would like to see go somewhere else, anywhere else?
We try, I think. We build shelters and roll out busses outfitted with showers. But the numbers keep getting worse. The anecdotes keep getting worse. On both sides.
My kids have been gone for years now. My feeling of personal identification with the potted plants that surround me has been growing for years: “Get out of there before the soil takes you.”
So why have I put it off? The city is expensive, sure, but I think if I’m honest with myself I’ve drug my feet because I don’t know if I have it in me to take on its problems. If I live there, I won’t be able to look away from the homeless. Not their blight, not their tormented lives, not the hopelessness of it all. I know I’ll have to try to help, if only in small ways. That’s what neighbors do for one another. I hope I’m up to it.
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