Mallory's Camera

Sybyl is now on a high protein/low carb diet, so I dropped off a case of Fancy Feast and a 10 lb. bag of her old dried cat food with Lois Lane.

Literacy Lollapalooza lost a chunk of its grant money.

Not that big a chunk but enough so that they cut Lois Lane’s hours down to 20 a week—which is insane because Lois Lane is actually the only employee there who actually does anything remotely related to the nonprofit’s mission statement; the rest of the staff is paid to hunt down and shake various money trees. She still oversees approximately 70 clients receiving literacy services as well as 25 tutors providing them, and she teaches two English-as-a-Second-Language classes.

In other words, she hasn’t cut back on anything she does; she’s just not getting paid for most of it.

And Billy was diagnosed with diabetes six months ago and has lost eighty-five pounds, but his blood sugar still hasn’t stabilized because Metformin isn’t the right drug for him but his insurance won’t pay for the drug that might actually work. He can only work erratically because he’s so ill.

She laughed when she opened her refrigerator to show me how empty it is. “On the plus side, I am losing weight! Mainly because I can’t afford to eat!”

She is now working three (count ’em) jobs, and she can barely cover their rent.

I was dismayed.

About the only thing I can do for her is bring her a big bag of veggies every week.

This is more help than it may seem to be—one of the great paradoxes of being diabetic and being poor in this country is that you can only afford cheap processed foods, which are absolutely the wrong thing to eat if you’re a diabetic.

But it’s not enough help.

“You’d be better off quitting Literacy Lollapalooza and going to work for Stop & Shop,” I told her. “They’re hiring. I think they start at $19 an hour.”

“I’m considering it,” she said. “Clearly, this is not sustainable.”

She wasn’t teary or sunk into any slough of self-pitying desperation while I was there.

In fact, she was as cheerful as I’ve ever seen her.

It’s not that adversity agrees with her exactly. I think it’s more that Lois Lane is the one person I know whose childhood was actually more horrific than my own, so when things start going south, she’s back in familiar territory.

I wish I had an umbrella large enough to shelter all the people I care about from the shitstorm that’s on its way, that’s already here for a lot of people.

But I simply don’t.

In fact, I can’t even be sure that my umbrella is big enough to shelter me.

I had Big Fun doing tax prep last night. The Alternatives Credit Union crowd is a fun group of people. Hard to know whether it’s the extreme poverty or the utter lack of a social set has affected me more over the last two and a half years. And of course they feed into each other. But I love bantering and got a chance to do some last night, and all in the service of the public good! Win/win, right?

Earlier that day, I had to do my laundry. One of the big degradations of being incredibly poor, believe it or not, is that you’re relegated to doing the laundry in a public place. When you own a washer and a dryer, laundry is no big deal: You stick a load in, you forget about it, you pull it out. But when you’re broke, laundry means making a trip and hoping no one is judging the state of your underwear – it’s new! I swear it! I got it at Walmart just a year and a half ago! – when you smuggle it into a machine. Two times out of ten, the machine is broken; you’ve wasted your laundry detergent and your quarters. Hey, those quarters add up!

Yesterday the only other inhabitant of the laundrymat was a ragged-looking man working on his cardboard sign. Homeless vet. Please help.

He looked to be in his forties which means he could have been anywhere from 25 to 60, I suppose. He had a large cut that needed suturing on his right temple, and he smelled really, really bad, that stage of body odor when it actually starts to ferment. But he didn’t look like a crazy guy or a drunk. He looked like someone who’d simply had incredibly bad luck.

He leaped up politely to help me with my laundry baskets. Softspoken, slight drawl. He didn’t seem as though he was helping me to get a handout out of it which was good, because I wasn’t in any position to give him a handout. Charity is kind of like those airplane disaster warnings: Put your own oxygen mask on first. My oxygen mask has a broken air supply right now. I’m desperately angling for a new one.

I felt really, really bad for him. This wasn’t the laundrymat I usually go to – it was an action-packed day yesterday what with studying for the tax exam, tutoring Tibetans and doing the actual tax prep itself. I picked a laundrymat that had freeway access. I guess that's why he picked this laundrymat too.

For some reason, I started thinking about something I used to do in Monterey when I had a large income, at least on paper, but an even larger number of expenses. The store needed stuff, Max needed stuff, Robin needed stuff, Ben needed stuff, the animals needed stuff. I got into the habit of hiding money. Slipping $20 bills into the pages of back-shelved books, pots I didn’t use very often, the baking soda box in the fridge. Then I willed myself to forget I’d put it there. My logic was that when I found the money again, it would seem like a gift from heaven and I could spend it on myself!! I did get a few good movies and cappuccinos out of it.

I also remembered my insane aunt Jane lecturing me when I first arrived in Ithaca and made contact. “But how can this be, Patty, Patty, Patty, that you have no money, that you didn’t think to put $1,000 away for a rainy day?”

I did think to put $1,000 away for a rainy day, Jane. But this ain’t no rainy day. It’s a typhoon.

I told the Tibetans about the guy in the laundrymat. They got their jobs back – sort of. Their hours were slashed. They now wait on the privileged children of the very rich five hours a day instead of eight hours a day. Not enough for benefits. Not enough to pay Baalorma’s childcare expenses.

“Poor people here, more poor people in India,” Tenzing said.

“Yes, but poor people here are old,” Baalorma said.

“Old people poor in India too.”

“Yes, but it is very odd. Americans do not take care of old people.”

“No,” I said. “We don’t really have that as a cultural tradition. Americans don’t expect to take care of their older relatives.”

“Over Christmas, at the mall, we see an old man standing with a sign,” Baalorma said. “He wants to go home, I think. His home is far away. And he makes me cry. So I give him money.”

“No!” says Tenzing. She grew up in India where the beggars are more common than sparrows. She has the pragmatic Buddhist’s view of extreme poverty, not unlike the view of certain Presbyterians and Calvinists: It may not be their fault exactly that these people are poor, but clearly it’s what God wanted. Otherwise they wouldn’t be poor! You don’t mess around with what God wants.

Baalorma shrugged. “I have only a little money. Two dollars, three dollars. I give it to him so he can go home. I hope he gets there.”

That word again… Home!