A TRADITION FINDS A NEW “HOME”

Sad news. The tree I’ve decorated the past two Christmases died. By midsummer, it was basically just a pole in the ground. Once, the little park had two trees. Now it has none. 

 

I either had to let my Christmas tree tradition die or find a new one in another park frequented by the homeless. I’ve spent the past few weeks riding my bike, staking out spots. I finally decided on Oppenheimer Park, still only a few blocks from my home. There’s a big, round cedar that caught my eye first. I walked over to take a closer look and it just didn’t speak to me. (Yes, I tried having a conversation. Tree huggers are tree talkers, too.) A Christmas cedar just didn’t seem right. 

 

Only ten feet away was another tree I hadn’t even noticed on my pedal-by. Slimmer, shorter…but a pine. A Christmas tree! And, yes, a natural Charlie Brown sort of scraggly tree to take over from the prior one. It only required borrowing a six-foot ladder from my building rather than one of the taller ones that might wabble without a helper this year to hold it in place. 

 

Passing by later in the day,
every bench was taken by 
people in conversation.

Oppenheimer Park is probably an even better park for a festive little tree. It’s frequented much more by homeless people and those living in supported housing. A few years ago, the park was a monthslong encampment with dozens of tents. Then, the City made everyone move along—a stressful change, no doubt—only to have tent dwellers resettle at another park in my area. For a while thereafter, the park had fencing all around it, locking everyone out who might re-pitch a tent along with anyone who wished to just sit on a bench and chat with someone else in the community. 

 

 I like to walk through rather than
around the park. This message
painted on the pavement
always lifts me. 

It's been unfenced and open to all for at least two years now. The park is a favorite for sea gulls whom the homeless like to feed leftovers from donated meals. It’s also a place where the benches fill, lots of conversations happening. As destitute as much of my neighborhood appears, basic needs like connection and belonging are met in spaces such as this. I won’t idealize the place. The park still feels grim. There’s a children’s playground where I’ve never seen a child play. (The crows favor it.) 

 

I’ll admit to being mildly concerned about problems arising if I decorated my Charlie Brown tree at Oppenheimer. I wasn’t concerned about the people who frequent the park. (Maybe someone would want to join in like last year.) I worried an overzealous police officer would Bah Humbug my stunt, asserting I needed a permit and advising that the City was unlikely to issue permits for rogue tree adornment. Gosh, maybe I’d even be ticketed, my attempt at token festiveness considered an act of vandalism. 

 

I walked with the ladder and my bag of decorations before sunrise. The morning fog might have been fortuitous too. It wouldn’t be an all-out stealth decorating activity, but maybe the red garlands and silver balls wouldn’t be such giveaways with their gleam. 

 

As I arrived at the park, the sea gulls were in their usual place, taking over the rarely used softball field. Four to six tents were set up in a cluster twenty-five feet away from the pine tree. On a nearby bench, two people slept huddled together, a tarp serving as a warmth-deprived blanket. One man sat on another bench, awake, seemingly content in his own thoughts, my presence not registering. No police officers or cars were in sight despite this area being frequently patrolled.

 

Decorating was easy. I only had to step to the third or fourth rung on the ladder to add ornaments to the upper reaches. Unfortunately, my star could not be suitably affixed  to the top. The droop was too pronounced—sad instead of quirky. Fine. No star. 

 

Traditions move. They adapt.

 

It took twenty minutes to adorn the tree, my gloves off to better handle and hook the ornaments. It’s worth noting that, by the time I was done, my fingertips were numb from the cold (2°C or 35°F). It wasn’t lost on me, the fact I had the luxury of going home and quickly warming up as I watched one man emerge from his tent to smoke a cigarette. Does that act offer any warmth?

 

The whole while, I kept wondering if it was my lack of decorating talent that made the tree seem sad. I told myself I could only do so much with what I had, like a dog groomer giving a makeover to 2022’s officially Ugliest Dog in some contest boycotted by everyone associated with the Westminster Kennel Club. 

 

Still, a man hidden underneath a parka with a hoodie passed by, saying, “Ho ho ho.” No exclamation mark but a suitable endorsement. Five minutes later another man emerged from one of the tents, rising for the day. I heard him chuckle, then say, “That is so cool, man!” A thumbs up, too. 

 

Yes! This is who the tree is for. It didn’t need to meet Martha Stewart’s approval. It didn’t need to become Instagram fodder. The intention was greater than the actual creation. Tent Guy got it and liked it. Mission accomplished. 

 

And like every supposedly selfless act, his cheer gave me cheer. This is what I need for the holiday. Yes, I’m all set for Christmas.

 

 

 

 

 

  

OOPS!…I DID IT AGAIN (CHRISTMAS EDITION)

Second year in a row. Does that make it a tradition? 

 

THE SETUP

There’s something about a guerrilla public tree decorating that gives me a festive lift this time of year. Last year, it was a solo effort. I worried my cheery idea might come with consequences. It wasn’t like I was going to chop down a pine tree in a public park and drag it home. No, I’d leave it be, roots intact, its perilous fate subject to other conditions, natural and otherwise. Still, I wondered if a police officer might approach, stand at the bottom of the ladder I’d “borrowed” from my condo building and await my descent (or just knock me off for his own holly jollies), then handcuff and haul me to the station, charged with public mischief, vandalism, theft and bad decorating. 

 

Was it worth the risk? I’m generally a rule-biding citizen, apart from an entrenched habit of jaywalking and crossing dead intersections against the light as other Vancouverites stand at the curb and stare in horror at such blatant disobedience. Vancouver puts my asterisked rule-biding inclinations to shame. I if I lived in New York City, I’d have a drawerful of civic commendations.

 

After some fretting, I took the risk and evaded arrest. This is Canada so maybe I’m on the Most Wanted list. Me and that otter who raided koi from the nearby Chinese gardens.

 

This year, I had accomplices, aiders and abetters. I’d lured both of them into bad decorating, a burgeoning gang, The Red Garlands. 

 

THE SETTING

First, however, some background about the setting. After some research, I feel it’s important to share.

 

I walk by a neglected pocket park every day, only a block from home. It’s a stopping point for the unhoused to sit and to maybe smoke something legal (cigarettes, pot) or otherwise (in a bubble pipe). I don’t judge. How does anyone cope with life on the streets? Sometimes there are a couple of tents set up. I imagine that, even though it’s right by the railroad tracks and trains run throughout the night (I know this firsthand!), it’s a less chaotic spot to try to sleep than so many other purported options. 

 

Officially, the park is known as Wendy Poole Park, described in a single sentence on Vancouver’s Board of Parks and Recreation website: 

Wendy Poole Park is a tiny park at the foot of Main Street, with a curving pathway, trees, and outlook to Burrard Inlet.

I could contact the board, give them an update. Trees is an overstatement. The dead skeleton of a tree with only two remaining branches—a stick tree—was removed at some point over the past year. It’s now down to one, a sad-looking pine, twelve feet tall, dwarfed by the tall building immediately to the west and the concrete overpass to the east. With its lower limbs removed, it’s a lollipop of a tree, mostly stick, not much pop, and definitely nothing that would conjure some fanciful image for lolli. 

 

Honestly, I don’t think the Parks Board cares. Its attention to this tiny space may have ended in late 2000 with the naming of park after First Nations and Downtown Eastside (DTES) groups and individuals lobbied to have it dedicated to Wendy Poole, a member of the Tsay Keh Dene First Nation. In January 1989, she was a twenty-year-old woman, pregnant with her second child. She’d moved from Northern British Columbia to Vancouver six months prior, looking for something more, finding her way, starting out by working in fast food. On January 26^th of that year, she was stabbed to death in her second-floor co-op, a murder that remains unsolved. She is one of many murdered and missing women remembered in Vancouver every Valentine’s Day during the Women’s Memorial March.

 

Had I not committed to giving the tree in the park a little seasonal spark, I would never have known the story behind its naming. There’s a plaque and a lovely rock with words etched in it. Like most of us in the community, I passed these markers by, unread. I’d seen the name. It’s really big on the rock. I’d foolishly assumed the place was named for a moneyed, prominent Vancouverite. Elsewhere in the downtown area is Jack Poole Plaza, named for a highly successful real estate developer who’d led the official campaign to bring the Winter Olympics to Vancouver and Whistler in 2010. I mistakenly assumed Wendy must have been his wife. Jack and Wendy’s lives were so starkly different.

 

There’s the history. Wendy would have turned forty-five this year. Let sharing be part of honoring and remembering her. (Sadly, I can find no photo.)

 

THE ADMISSION

Last week, with only days until my boyfriend Evan’s next trip up from Seattle, I floated the idea of him being my partner in Christmas mischief. He didn’t hesitate. That’s my guy. Man of many talents. New skill for that LinkedIn account: elfin antics.

 

Upon his arrival, we scanned the long aisle of decorations at a downtown dollar store and I returned the next day to buy all the tree trimmings. (Nothing was a dollar, of course. It’s self-apparent that The Few Dollars Store doesn’t have quite the right ring to it. Still, the glittery haul was a bargain.)

 

Rain got in the way of decorating. Heavy rain. Bah, humbug, Mother Nature! Heavy snow would have been perfect. Tomorrow then. Or the tomorrow after that. Or not. (I didn’t want the decorations to get swooshed off the tree in the first hour. I also didn’t want to break my leg, slipping on an upper rung on the ladder!)

 

On the morning Evan was to return to Seattle, the weather cleared. Not sunny but anything not involving rain is a gift this time of year. I grabbed the bag of decorations and we headed to my building’s parking garage to grab one of the ladders. (It’s a building of lofts. These ladders are for common use…or at least that’s been my assumption. Why ask? 

 

Hi, officer. Just taking the ladder for a walk. No dog so you gotta make do, right?

 

Last year’s graffiti had been painted over, now replaced by new tagging. Bigger! Bolder! Only one tent was pitched as we arrived to decorate the sad little pine tree. A gentleman sat at the lone picnic table, smoking a cigarette, not paying any attention to two guys with a ladder.

 

I decided to put the star on first. It would be the trickiest part. It also required standing on the highest rung. Let me get that over with before any dormant fear of heights awakened within and before I got too casual from all the ups and downs, less alert, more accident-prone. The star wouldn’t stay. Evan offered directions from ground control, but I got flustered. Your move, Evan. 

 

He’d only signed on to be a helper elf. Ladder climbing wasn’t in the job description. But my merriness was in a precarious state. Evan’s all too aware of how quickly I can shut down when I decide I can’t do something. He climbed, he fiddled and fidgeted, he willed that star to stay. The ornament was heavier than the pine tufts it topped so there was a sag to its stance. Quirky. Let’s call it whimsical. I don’t care what Martha Stewart would say.

 

We switched roles again, with me navigating the ladder and Evan unpacking ornaments. As we decorated, I caught the man at the picnic table glancing over a couple of times. At first, I wondered if we were an unwelcome presence. Maybe he’d come here for some solitude only to be disturbed by a couple of wannabe elves. His face was hard to read. Then he called: “Need some help? I could hold the ladder.” 

 

And so he did. 

 

Last year’s project was a solo effort but, with three of us, it went faster and felt merrier. I noticed a few people smiling as they passed and one person shouted, “Dr. Seuss!” probably in a nod to the sagging star atop the tree. She followed up with a robust “Merry Christmas!” Was she always this excited or did we lift her spirits?

 

And yet he cropped just so to
keep the bags under my eyes!

My new ladder assistant held it in place each time we rotated it. He nodded off ever so briefly, hand still on it, committed, doing his best. He added an ornament to one of the lower branches.

 

We exchanged names. I took his picture, but he didn’t have a phone to forward it. He took ours, too. I could tell he was too close to get us and the tree. I knew the shot would be one of those flawed pics from the days of going to Fotomat. All the better. 

 

He said he was from the BC Interior and had come to Vancouver’s sketchy Downtown East Side to get his son but, in so doing, he’d relapsed. Addiction is relentlessly opportunistic.

 

Yes, Martha. That's the tree.

All done, Evan and I walked the ladder home and I turned my head back to see my ladder assistant walking slowly down the street in a different direction, his face blank again. It was a novel start to the day for each of us and a rare chance for strangers living different realities to connect, however briefly. 

 

This “tradition” is evolving.

 

TRAVELS WITH LIZBETH (Book Review)

By Lars Eighner 

 

(St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993)

 

I stumbled on this book title after spotting an obituary last month in The New York Times. The headline caught my eye: “Lars Eighner, 73, Who Wrote About Being Homeless.” (Eighner died on December 23, 2021 in Austin but his publisher, St. Martin’s Press, found out about it more recently.) I have long been consumed by issues of homelessness and frustrated with my inertia in doing something about it. I donate to a local charity that provides meals to people living on the street, I occasionally purchase grocery gift cards and hand them out during times of the year far from the annual “season of giving” and I have often included homeless characters in my manuscripts, including my published middle grade novel, Fouling Out. 

 

I knew I absolutely had to read this book.

 

It just so happens that Eighner was a gay man who earned some money as a writer prior to being homeless and while being homeless. His genre: erotic gay fiction. Eighner intones that every story he wrote was accepted for publication. Damn! I don’t have anything like that track record. (I’m not about to enter the erotic gay fiction market. So often, writers are told “write what you know.” Thus, I must disqualify myself and, for that, avid readers of erotic gay fiction can be grateful.)

 

Eighner was homeless for much of the period from 1988 to 1991. In the 1980s, Eighner was living in Austin, Texas, working in a state mental hospital. He clashed with a supervisor, though the circumstances aren’t detailed. It seems that, in part, Eighner, objected to mistreatment of some of the patients/residents; as well, he felt he could do better working with higher functioning residents. He was given the choice to resign or be fired. By resigning, he didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits. When finding a job proved more challenging than expected, he couldn’t pay the rent for the shack he lived in and, with eviction looming, he took what possessions he could and decided to hitchhike his way to Southern California, thinking job prospects would be better in an area of the country where writers seemed to be in demand.

 

Lizbeth was his dog, a black and white mutt to whom Lars doesn’t assign Best Dog Ever qualities. She’s just a dog, not especially bright, not especially anything. But she’s his. While housing prospects would have been better without a dog in tow, giving her up was never an option. On colder nights when he’d sleeping among bushes, he and Lizbeth provided one another a trace of warmth. On hotter days in desert areas, much of time was consumed trying to find enough water for the two of them.

 

Eighner’s homelessness had nothing to do with alcoholism or drug addiction. For some, that would make him a “worthier” character study; for others, that would render the memoir less compelling, being as there was one less struggle to overcome. I hesitate to add that he comes across as highly intelligent—another factor on the “worthy” scale. The New York Times obituary mentions that Eighner studied at Rice University and the University of Texas, ultimately dropping out due to bouts with migraines and “a falling-out with his family over his sexual orientation,” a circumstance common to queer youth, sending them into adulthood at a disadvantage.

 

The hitchhiking parts of the memoir feel monotonous, probably because that’s how it was. Eighner was at the mercy of whoever stopped and, often, the drivers were dubious characters with very little money themselves, recklessly driving cars that would break down. Another writer might have played up the drama, but Eighner delivers his accounts flatly.[1] When he made a second roundtrip hitchhiking journey from Austin to L.A., I thought, Please, no…less for his sake than mine. 

 

Still, his accounts of being homeless don’t need to be emotionally heightened. There’s a relentlessness to the life. Some people offered simple kindnesses while others—particularly, it seems, the residents of Tucson—preferred to kick a guy when he was already down. There’s a section on dumpster diving, published as a stand-alone piece prior to the book, that gives a flavor of how to be resourceful and self-sufficient. Eighner kept to himself instead of joining other homeless people at makeshift encampments. As well, he didn’t access supports such as meal programs and group shelters, in part because he had Lizbeth with him. He also resolved to never beg for money. 

 

Eighner explains there’s an art to knowing where the best dumpsters are and learning the times of year when they yield greater finds. His account speaks to how wasteful society is, even as that’s to his benefit. Eighner also offers insights into how to make the best guesses as to what food finds are less risky to eat than others although he mentions having dysentery about once a month since there are always risks. This comment, more than anything, has added to my empathy for homeless people I see in Vancouver. Many times, I come across people who have soiled themselves and, on one occasion, I searched to find a thrift shop to get the passed-out individual a towel and another pair of pants, wanting to spare the fellow the indignities that would greet him upon his awakening. Alas, there’s nothing available at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.   

 

On homelessness, Eighner provides a flavor of daily life, much of it about scrounging for food and water, hiding his few belongings and hoping they’re neither stolen nor vandalized and trying to be unseen so as not to be forced to pack up and find a new place to shelter.

 

A homeless life has no storyline. It is a pointless circular rambling about the stage that can be brought to happy conclusion only by a deus ex machina. 

 

Rent, deposits, transportation, suitable clothing, living expenses: the kind of money required to obtain a home cannot be saved from pennies picked up on the street…[A homeless person’s] fate is no longer in his hands. He may survive, but no more than survive. 

 

Eighner’s writing is strongest when he makes observations of the systems set up ostensibly to offer help. It’s hardly surprising that Eighner does not speak highly of medical staff and social workers who purport to offer assistance, the offerings piecemeal and paternalistic. Of one account, he writes:

 

The social worker prolonged the interview after it was clear he could not offer me any material benefit. He wanted me to apply for a program that would allow the costs of…his services in advising me that he had no services to offer…This is of course all that social workers exist for: to keep the funds flowing to the institution, thus to preserve their own salaries. Otherwise they are just about as helpful as the average high school guidance counselor.

 

There’s an eye-opening section from Eighner’s time in Austin where he meets Daniel, a young man with AIDS who has been displaced and who is purportedly on a waiting list for a hospice in Houston:  

 

I asked Daniel what the local AIDS agency had done for him. He said they were mostly burned-out on him. Although I had donated what I could to the AIDS agency, I did not have much confidence in them. I could see, however, that Daniel was a hard case, a prickly pear.

 

Most agencies, and especially their volunteers who do so much of the real work, want cuddly, warm clients. In the case of AIDS, that means the volunteers are best prepared for people who will lie down and die quietly. Many people…envision themselves as ministering martyrs among the lepers. They imagine the work will involve many tender and touching moments as their patients struggle to express eternal gratitude before expiring gently. Such scenes are filmed through gauze and Vaseline.

 

It should be obvious that this memoir by a gay man has little to do with being gay. Eighner’s account is of a homeless man who happens to be gay. It’s more a tale of a man and his dog than a man seeking another man. (Lizbeth died in 1998 at the age of thirteen, still with Eighner.) There are a few brief references to sexual encounters. (Is it terrible that I felt jealous of a homeless man having better “luck” than me? I know…shame.) What may prove surprising, even fascinating, is that Clint,[2] a character Eighner and Lizbeth knew from their days in the shack in Austin, pops up again much later, joining Eighner in being homeless. We learn in the afterword that Clint and Lars, characterized as the beauty and the beast by the writer, remained a couple, the relationship continuing for twenty-three years as of 2012. Eighner’s obituary notes that the couple married in 2015 and remained together—thirty-three years—until Eighner’s death. Love may not overcome everything but what a testament to silver linings.  

 

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[1] In the Afterword, written in 2013, Eighner alludes to Asperger’s, noting, “Many have noticed my dispassionate tone throughout the book…Lately it occurred to me that there might be an underlying cause…I acknowledge I am indebted to Jim Parsons for his portrayal of Sheldon Cooper; I now understand so much better what has always been wrong with me.” A shame that he would word it that way.

[2] All people mentioned in the book are given fictitious names. I love Eighner’s extraordinarily logical explanation: “I have changed the names of people and of institutions…I know my perspective did not often reveal the best side of people. When it did, I think I best return the favor by respecting the privacy of those who helped me. At any rate, I thought to name some and not name others would imply a criticism that, in some cases, I did not intend.”

 

“Clint” remains so in the afterword while other people are named. “He did not sign on to be a public person and so remains ‘Clint.’ The obituary discloses that his name is Cliff Hexamer and that Eighner took Hexamer’s last name when they wed.