A Girl Called Destiny

I am in the car, driving Downtown, with Stephanie, Pete, and a girl called Destiny, and in the boot of the car are salads and tuna sandwiches and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bottles of water that we are going to give out to the homeless people of San Diego.
'Okay, we are Team Awesome,' says Stephanie who has long brown hair and a big smile, and whose car, an Audi, we are in, 'and here are the rules for Team Awesome. We stay together, we don't engage in conversation, we don't wake people who are sleeping,'
Then Stephanie starts the car and tell us more rules, while at the same time, driving, laughing and shouting about pedestrians.
'Oops,' she says, 'I don't want to be an arsehole who runs over pedestrians, that would be so totally not cool,'
Then she yells at someone to get out of the way.
'Out of the way, areshole,' she says, and laughs and turns the corner.
Then she asks us what our names are, and we all call out our names again.
Pete says Pete, Destiny says Destiny, I say my name and the Stephanie says hers again.
Then Stephanie asks us all what we do.
Pete says he's an arborist and Stephanie says cool.
I tell Pete and Destiny and Stephanie what I do and everyone says 'cool', but we don't get around to what Destiny or Stephanie do because we haven't gone very far before Stephanie sees some homeless people and is parking the car and yelling 'WOOH', first stop, let's roll, let's rock out some SALADS,'
Then Stephanie tells us we have to hurry because we are parked in a disabled parking space and she is not disabled.
'Clearly,' says Stephanie, running on the spot while putting bottled water into a hessian shopping bag, 'I am NOT disabled, so we gotta, like totally roll on this one,'
For the next 10 minutes we walk from homeless person to homeless person offering the salad in polystyrene containers, the tuna sandwiches, the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the bottles of water.
'You want some dog food?' says a woman a who has no teeth, and no dog that I can see, 'Someone gave me so much dog food,'
Stephanie smiles and laughs and says 'WOOP, no thanks, you hang on to it, we've got dog food' and walks on.
Then we go back to the car and, while we are driving around looking for more homeless people, Stephanie talks about how she's becoming Jewish because she's marrying a Jewish guy.
'I call it How to Become a Jew School,' she says, of the classes she is taking to convert to Judaism.
Then she tells us how expensive it is to become a Jew, $2.500 a year for temple fees, another $500 for ground fees, $250 for classes but that he fiance's father, who lives in Beverly Hills and is 'minted', is chipping in.
'You should see the temple,' Stephanie tells me and Phil and Destiny, 'it is BEAUTIFUL,'
Then, just as Stephanie is explaining the similarities between Buddhism and Judaism, and telling us that Jew school is on Thursdays so she won't be able to do the homeless food drop for 6 months while she becomes a Jew, sees some homeless people gathered at the side of a windowless convenience store, and parks the car.
I look out of the car window and see, on the footpath at the side of the convenience store, a very fat black woman in a white dress, sitting in a wheelchair.
In her white dress she is glowing under the light that drops on her from the one light on the street.
On the ground, in the shadow around her, people are lying on dirty piles of blankets.
On the corner there are more people standing around a rubbish bin.
'Wooh, let's rock those salads,' says Stephanie and me and Phil and Stephanie and Destiny get out of the car and cross the street and ask the people standing around the rubbish bin if they would like a salad.
Some say yes and we give them the salads.
Then I ask the woman in the wheelchair if she would like a salad.
'It's the only thing we have left now,' I tell her and she smiles, says yes, she would like a salad, and then says 'bless you,'
And then I offer a salad to a woman lying on the ground next to the woman in the wheelchair.
The woman on the ground says yes, she would like a salad, but she doesn't move to sit up so I put the salad on the ground next to her and she says 'bless you,' also.
It is night now, and except for the light falling from that one street lamp, it is all dark around us.
So we walk around, handing out the salads until all the salads are gone and then when we have no more salads we cross the street, get back into Stephanie's car, and me and Phil and Stephanie and Destiny go home.



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This must be what they call the American Dream

This morning while I was cycling back from the gym under the freeway overpass, I saw, sitting in a fold out camp chair on the footpath, a lone woman.
The woman, who looked to be around 60, had neatly brushed hair, was wearing a dark red sweater, a pair of glasses and holding something in her hands which as I got closer I saw was something like embroidery.
Some kind of needlework equipment, wool or yarn.
Sitting there in her fold out chair, with her needlework, the woman looked as if she might be on a seaside holiday.
Or that she might enjoying a quiet afternoon listening to the radio while her husband was out watching the football with his pals.
Except she was sat on a foldout chair in an underpass, a freeway full of motoring humans speeding away above her.
And shopping trolleys were parked all along the wall of the underpass and there were empty food boxes, plastic soft drink bottles, overflowing bins and, as the day was already hot and blowy, the intermittent odour of human urine on the dusty wind.

'Oh, look, I said to myself as I cycled uphill against that pissy wind, 'this must be what they call the American Dream.'

A Handshake With a Man Wearing a Helmet.

This morning as I left the gym, a wild-haired though tidily-dressed man, pulling a small, wheeled, carry on luggage and wearing something similar to a hockey helmet, stopped me and began looking me up and down.
'Where'd you get all those tattoos?' he said.
'England,' I said back to him.
'Whereabouts in England?' he said,
'Oxford,' I said, lying.

Then, not wanting to be unsociable, I stood there letting him look me up and down for a bit until he suddenly stopped, stared right into my eyes and said- 'I think there's an English professor from Oxford.'
And then he began to tell me a story that I could not understand.
A story that might have been about a trip he had taken to Oxford and that might have involved something about his family.
I stood holding my bicycle and saying 'uh-huh' until he finally stopped talking and held out his hand.
I  took his hand and shook it until he let go.
'God bless you' he told me 3 times.
'Thank you,' I told him, 'very much.'

I thought about that meeting most of the way home, about how I'd immediately wanted to wash my hand and about how the skin on the man's hand had been so much softer than I'd expected.

Someone took our vegetable box and someone else brought it back

This morning, at around 7am, someone knocked on the door and when I answered it I saw a man holding a biggish cardboard box.
There was a woman standing down on the footpath looking up at us.
The man said hello and then began to explain that he wasn't a delivery man, but that this was our box of vegetables.
'I live over on G street,' he said holding the box out toward me, 'and we found this in the street outside our house,'
'Oh,' I said, looking inside the box , 'we were wondering what happened to our vegetable box,'
Inside the box was a cauliflower, a carrot, a bunch of beet root and a small plastic bag with mushrooms in it.
'We recognised the box because we get a delivery from the same company,' said the man, who had a black moustache and was wearing a baseball cap and a blue polo shirt with a name tag of a solar installation company pinned to it.
I took the box of vegetables and stood there looking down at the few vegetables left.
'They have only taken, which would make sense if it was a homeless person, the things they didn't need to cook, like...all the fruit,' I said.

The man and the woman and I all agreed that it was probably a homeless person who had taken it and then we chatted for a bit about the box, about the the neighbourhood, about how good the Mexican take away on the corner is, about where was the best place for the vegetable delivery to be left, and then laughed and said that we hoped whoever had taken the fruit had enjoyed
it.
And then the man said, 'My name is Robert,'
'Hello, Robert' I said putting the vegetable box on the porch and holding out my hand, 'my name is Toni, and thank you for bringing back our vegetable box.'

This morning, cycling home from saying goodbye to Isaac, Tatji and Matti, I crossed the bridge over the Martin Luther King Freeway (freeway number 94) and saw, on the footpath, a human being wrapped up in blankets.

This morning, cycling home from saying goodbye to Isaac, Tatji and Matti, I crossed the bridge over the Martin Luther King Freeway (freeway number 94) and saw, on the footpath, a human being wrapped up in blankets.

The human looked like the exact shape of an Egyptian mummy, except whoever it was was wrapped in what looked like a blue nylon sleeping bag with another beige patterned blanket wrapped around that.

I was standing there, holding my bicycle and wondering what to do when a young man with a shaved head, wearing shorts and headphones, crossed the bridge toward me.

'Excuse me,' I said to him, pointing to the wrapped up person laying on the footpath, 'do you think that person over there is alright?'

The young man took his headphones out of his ears and looked back to where he had just crossed the bridge.

'Look, he's moving so I guess he's okay,' the young man said and then we both stood there for a moment, watching the sleeping person moving around.

'I wondered if I should call someone because whoever is in that wrap up is almost on the road,'
'They do that, they stay as close to the road as possible,' the young man told me, 'so they can be seen in case anything happens, in case they get attacked or anything,'
'Shit,' I said, 'that's terrible. Should we do something, like... anything?'

'No,' the young man told me, 'there's nothing you really can do, but it's really, like, totally cool of you to care.'

*********
I'm making a drawing about Tony Abbott.

It's called 'In Australia Not All Creatures Are Dangerous, However Some Are Extremely Poisonous'
Abbott's face will go in the little space bottom right, Gina Rinehart above, and then that left frame is for Rupert Murdoch.
Mr Poisonous, Mrs Greedy and Mr Power-Swollen.

There's a woman living in the alley next to the Panchita's bakery.

There's a woman living in the alley next to the Panchita's bakery.
I don't know if the woman lives full time in the alley, but according to Leonora, who cuts my hair at the Grapes Beauty Salon in Golden Hill, San Diego, the woman doesn't want to be homed.
She wants to stay in the alley.
The other day, while we were inside having lunch at the Pomegranate Cafe, the woman who lives in the alley walked past the window pushing her shopping trolley.
There was a younger woman with her, also pushing a loaded 'not-with-food' shopping trolley
The older woman looks to be extremely old and her mouth forms a big open grin, so if you didn't know, and if she was dressed not in rags, and not pushing a shopping trolley overflowing with shopping bags and other things, then you might think she was just a happy old woman walking on a sunny afternoon.
And maybe she is. I just do not know.

It was 6.45 am and I was in the street taking the washing to the outside laundry room when a man stopped me.

 
It was 6.45 am and I was in the street taking the washing to the outside laundry room when a man stopped me.
He was wearing a white towel, frayed jeans and he had no shoes on.
'Ma'am,' he said, 'you didn't lose these did you?'
I looked down and he was holding a pair of sunglasses, a style I wouldn't wear but that someone who liked snow skiing might.
'No,' I said, 'they're not mine,'
'Oh,' he said, looking at the glasses.
Then, he held up an empty packet that looked like it had held a television remote control.
'I was going to put them in here, ma'am, and give them back but I thought you might like them,'
I said thank you but no thank you.
Then he said-'What does this mean? and pointed to a word in French that was printed on the empty TV remote control packet.
'I'm not sure,' I said and then we both stood there for a few moments trying to work it out.
Then he offered me the glasses again.
I told him he should keep them because later on it would get sunny.
'Yes' ma'am,' he said, 'I guess so.'
Then he said thank you and told me to have a nice day.
I told him the same thing.

When I came back from the laundry room the man was sitting across the road, on the curb, staring up the street.
I came inside and told Kimberly about the man and asked if I should go and offer him a boiled egg, but by the time we had decided yes, we should offer him something the man was walking across the stretch of dirty red soil, where people take their dogs to shit, and down the hill toward the freeway.