Melodie Edwards

Safe Havens in Hard Times:

One Family’s History of Giving Shelter to Transients

When I was eleven years old, Robin came to stay with us for the first time. Just for a short while–he never stayed for long. He’d just been extradited from Spain where he’d spent months in a hospital recovering from a heroin overdose. The American embassy agreed to pay for him to come home for methodone treatments—the first time he’d been back to the United States in decades—on the condition that his passport be suspended indefinitely. A cruel stroke for a man who’s only pleasure in life was derived from wandering the face of the earth. Robin slept on our couch because we didn’t have a spare bedroom. Or in the backyard in a sleeping bag. He had no stories to tell of his travels, very few words to spare at all. And didn’t warn us when he would go. Riding my bike down by the VFW hall on the outskirts of town, he waved at me as he walked out of town into the wide blue of the high plains sky, waggling his thumb for a ride. It would be a few years before we saw him again.

I wasn’t surprised when Robin arrived or when he left. It was a way of life in our family. Sometimes we had roughnecks sleeping in the old travel trailer in our backyard for weeks on end. One time my mom gave me a glass of water and told me to go splash it in Bob’s face to wake him up because he was hung over and needed to get to work on time. I dutifully carried out her orders. Bob woke up spluttering, water streaming off his long tangled black beard. “What the hell?” he hollered but when he saw it was me, just flopped back onto his bed and awhile later emerged in his greasers, ready to go to work. It was just life living in someone’s backyard. Bob had run away from home with his brother at the age of fourteen and we were as close to a family for him as he’d ever had. We’re still his surrogate family and he calls regularly from Seattle when he’s off the fishing boat he captains.

Giving the homeless a place to sleep, room in the fridge, a sanitary toilet was something my father was brought up with. In fact, Robin had first started coming to stay with my dad when they were boys growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Robin was an orphan, raised by his grandmother, but when he reached adolescence, he moved into my grandparents’ basement. My grandfather was the campus minister for the University of Michigan in the 1950’s and 60’s. He helped hundreds of young men get out of the Vietnam draft using the conscientious objector argument. He installed a pool table in his basement for all the adolescent young men who made his house their home on and off over the years. Boys with bad home lives. Boys hiding the draft. Boys unsure how to make a living in a town where you were nobody if your parents weren’t professors at the university.

When Robin first started wandering the world, my father was standing next to him by the side of the road. They hitchhiked to California together and that’s where my dad met my mom. In Santa Monica, at a pizza parlor. My mom was fresh off the Iowa farm, working at a gym teaching calisthenics, I guess, and, by night, taking bullfighting lessons from a matadora. Everything in her was ready to meet a man like my father, reckless and aimless and rootless. But Robin’s path soon diverged, my parents hitchhiking off to Mexico and back to Ann Arbor, Robin finagling rides across oceans. Once, he sent my mother an amber and silver ring from Turkey. Soon afterward, they heard he was in a Turkish prison for smuggling drugs. He was a bus driver for the Green Turtle, a bus making drug runs from Amsterdam to Turkey. I remember that ring on my mother’s finger, it’s distinctive rattle, the amber loose in its setting, a clink clink each time she brushed her hair back. Now it’s a ring I wear often and my children hear that same rattle, hear those same stories, about Robin and his world travels. Like me growing up, they get parts of the stories and over the years, those stories will periscope out to the whole picture. The stories of the transient are anti-fairy tales. No good guys or bad guys. No one to be blamed or excused. “But when someone’s down on their luck,” my father always says, “you help them out.”

Automobiles somehow seemed to be fair compensation for a place to sleep in our house. Robin purchased an old 50’s Toyota Land Rover that I drove as my own first vehicle for months while he was out at sea on fishing boat canneries. I never actually saw him drive the vehicle, never saw him ever behind the wheel of a car, but he must have aspired to being a regular guy with a set of keys jangling in his pocket. But every season when it came time for him to hire out on the canneries, he walked out to the highway and hitchhiked away without his Land Rover, which was perfectly fine with me. I loved that vehicle and was sorry when he decided to sell it for extra travel funds. He hasn’t owned a car since. Not that I know of anyway. Once, we heard he lingered awhile with a woman in Texas but whether he owned possessions there, paid rent or utilities, we don’t know. There’s a lot about Robin we don’t know, although I think he’s told my dad more than I’ll ever learn. Both of them seem to be of the opinion that some stories are best letting corrode and wash away with time.

Then, when I was fourteen, Jack the ex-judge moved in to our basement in trade for his diesel Volkwagon Jetta. We had moved away from the small ranching town to a nearby mid-sized city. Soon after we arrived, my father found Jack living in his car in a grocery store parking lot. Jack had been the judge in our small town all the time I was growing up, but when his wife left him and took his daughter to the big city, he had followed in despair. He moved into a dark room off our laundry room and lived with us through one small house and on into a second basement when we relocated into a log house on a farm on the outskirts of town. This second basement flooded regularly and he set up his bed and his book shelf and his alarm clock on high ground in one corner and built himself a series of unstable bridges with lumber across the dankness and geckos. I remember teetering across them to wake him when he had a phone call, which was infrequent. He made appearances upstairs only for Law and Order and Thanksgiving dinner. For a while, he offered law advice to college students for a nominal fee at the university. But mostly he worked in dorm cafeterias, cooking for minimum wage. As far as I know, he never owned a car again. I’d see him all over town, biking along lumbersomely, winter or summer, huddled in his windbreaker, the hood tied under his chin. He lived with us for seven years, until my parents moved back to the small town in the mountains where he had once resided as town judge. He declined to go along. Last year, we got a phone call from one of Jack’s old friends: Jack had passed away. It was a hard blow for my dad. When he found an old pocket knife Jack had given him, he stowed it carefully away in a drawer in his bureau as a keepsake. He wrote the obituary for Jack for the town newspaper.

After moving back to the small mountain town where they felt most comfortable, my parents bought an old grocery store in the middle of nowhere. Rainbows arched overhead, cattle drives stopped traffic on the highway. People stopped in for sarsaparilla and fly fishing advice. Out back was a string of cabins that filled during hunting season, each outfitted with a small fridge, a two burner stove, a table and chair, a bed. The toilet and the shower were on the back of the store. You had to wade through the dogs to get to them in the early morning hour when the yellow-headed black birds and the frogs were the noisiest from a nearby pond. Off season, my parents rented the cabins out to the wayward of the world: Vietnam vets, dreamers, drunks, recluses, artists, fishermen, rehabers, and loonies, all the variety of lost souls living outside the edge of culture. Usually my parents made arrangements with these tenants to work off their rent for help around the place. Rarely did much work get accomplished. There was Doris and Russ who rented my bedroom after I graduated from high school and moved with my parents to the mountains when they went. Russ was a vet with a bad back and worse nightmares, but Doris learned the cash register and could flip a hamburger. Eventually, Russ died of cancer and Doris found the Jehovah’s Witnesses and moved into her own trailer, but she still house sits when my parents leave town.

And then there was my husband and me, we lived in those cabins too, in between things. I remember, pregnant with twins, living in cabin #5, and waking up in the middle of the night to pee and wandering out into the pitch black to the songs of coyotes and feeling around for my robe that didn’t close properly over my belly and tottering out into the dark to the bathroom. Typing stories all day at a Formica topped table. Everybody put in their time in those small, brightly lit rooms with the garage sale furniture and the spiders, my brother and his family, my cousin, and even us.

Maybe because I grew up in a house where it was okay to be homeless, I ended up putting in my time as a transient too. Once we took a Greyhound out to New Jersey to pick up my brother’s car and found it had been irreparably totalled. We crashed at my great aunt and uncle’s for three weeks until Ken got lucky at bingo at their senior center and won $75, enough to get us home.

For several years, our only shelter was a canvas geodesic dome tent on ten acres of cinder desert outside Flagstaff, Arizona. We filled 5-gallon water jugs to do our dishes and bathe in. Our only electricity came from a small wind generator that put out enough juice to light one small lamp for a couple evenings. But the drive in and out to work every day was grueling, over muddy, rutted roads and we had to spend a lot of nights in town when the weather was bad or when we drank too much at the local brew pup to drive home. “Yeah, it’s cool,” our friend Skip said, “I just think of you all as my Russian roommates.” We slept on his spare futon in his studio apartment, trying to sleep through the guttural noises that came from his bed when he brought home a girl. I remember getting up early to write on my laptop on the toilet seat. After Skip moved away, another friend gave us a room in his apartment and never charged us rent and wouldn’t take any when we tried to foist it on him. “I prefer not to exchange money,” Jason told us and then let us bring an ailing dog to stay and die there, like an animal hospice. We’d found our version of my parents, someone who believed in giving freely what he had to spare.

As things gets tighter, the rhetoric of hard times bears down with a more sinister crush, and I think of my parent’s odd choices more thoughtfully. My mother and father-in-law retired a decade and a half ago, giving up their home to live in a R.V. But when my father-in-law began to slip into dementia, unable to maneuver the fifth wheel cross-country, they had no place to live and no finances to start over, and we so offered them a place to live in a 400-square-foot house in our backyard. It’s twenty-one steps from our back door to their front. They help around our bookstore and with babysitting. We take care of my father-in-law for an afternoon when my mother-in-law is in tears with the strain of his confusion, of worrying that he’ll escape his own home into the alleys and forget himself.

There may have been a time when money could have paid for respite care, for an apartment in a senior community, but that time seems long ago, misty, if it ever actually existed. Haven’t people always needed each other this bad? Was there ever really a time when we could sit by and watch other people flounder and not invite them in, a time when we even called it trespassing? A time now ages back when we saw the luxury of borders and family units and safety zones as a permanent state, even confused it as a cultural norm, as something we deserved as part of a national identity—a freedom not to extend help. How could we have not seen that safety was slipping, a time would come when we’d be forced to find the extra rooms and cupboards and basement holes and high spots above the flood waters where random strangers could be safe in our homes. I wonder if the time is here yet or if our national sense of xenophobia has settled into our fibers to stay.

Thanksgivings in my family were always a special affair when anyone and everyone in your life without family or connections or a home were invited over for a good meal. I remember Jack and several of his friends, bachelor miscreants with bald or silver heads and lots of wild progressive ideas to spout, would come and bring a dish to share that they’d bought at the supermarket deli.

It’s a tradition we carry on in our family now. This year, we filled our house with a mishmash of people and my five-year-old daughters wandered through the crowd, learning to talk to strangers. Many of our guests were friends we’d made among our regular customers at our used bookstore, Night Heron Books in Laramie, Wyoming where we’ve finally settled down to a less transient existence. Used bookstores are not unlike good taverns, except for the daylight hours, attracting eccentrics with only enough loose change in their pockets to support their paperback habits and giving people without family a place to come carry on long, verbose, esoteric conversation. Before we sat down to eat, our Japanese guests tried to talk to my girls in broken English to tell them how cute they were and my girls only stared at their mouths moving, unable to understand. Alfred, the 82-year old deaf artist, brought my children piles of strange archaic art supplies and told them, “I need to get to know you better.” He has never been married, has no family living except a niece in Florida. Daily, he brings Ken elaborate savory pies and bratwurst in exchange, ostensibly, for computer technical support and companionship. He lives alone and in semi-destitution amongst his cats and exquisite embroidery and quilted wall hangings. In the early 50’s, he shared a show at the Met with Andy Warhol. Now lost and wandering, unable to hear well enough to form two-way friendships, knocking about in the nooks of Laramie.

Amy came to Thanksgiving, too. She’s a former monk and a macroeconomics buff. Ken records a podcast about all the economics headlines with her every Tuesday morning, getting her take on the fall of the American empire. Amy uses a pseudonym for the podcast. She is alienated from her family since they wouldn’t give her permission to join a monastery, permission that’s required to join and which her family wouldn’t extend since they felt she was needed to take care of her aging father. So instead of ecclesiastical duties of a monastery, she works nights cleaning rooms at a swanky hotel in town and works at our bookstore here and there, shelving, in exchange for access to our wireless computer connection. She’s a fanatical online Go player and can be found in our bookstore into the wee hours of the morning, playing the game and making remote friendships with fellow Go fiends. “I can’t get internet in my own apartment,” she explains, “because then I wouldn’t get any praying done.” She regularly babysits for us, taking our children out for lemonade and trips to the Salvation Army for a toy from the deep and musty bins.

At the Thanksgiving table, we also shared a meal with a Shamanic drumming guy and an old hippie couple who came in their VW bus and were the ones to invite the Japanese students. My father-in-law, confused by the lot of them, sat in the rocking chair and smiled, everyone going out of their way to make him comfortable, bringing him wassail and cheese ball. And then, of course, there was my mom and dad, making loud, political conversation from their end of the table, my dad randomly sitting down at the piano to bang out a bar or two of jazz. Both of them entirely comfortable with the spectacle, expecting it, in no way finding the Thanksgiving dinner peculiar or something to be marveled at.

But my children did. “Where are the other kids?” they wanted to know. I told them, “All your friends all have families and places to go for Thanksgiving. We invite people to dinner who don’t have all that.” It’s the same message I grew up with. It isn’t comfortable for children, growing up around eccentrics and the displaced, trust me. But I grew up knowing the full spectrum of human variety, the dark and the light, frequently all wrapped up in the same skin. Speaking to a friend who endured abuse in her home as a child, she pondered why my parents would bring strangers into our house and put their children at risk of violence or exploitation. I shrugged and said, “My parents were a good judge of character.”

I want my children to be a good judge of character and they can only learn that skill by meeting in person, in the safety of their own home and with my calm presence nearby, all the fruitcakes on the day-old shelf, all the types that society has passed up. As a girl, growing up, I was less comfortable with the well-educated and the well-off because I didn’t understand for a long time that they wore masks. The down and outers I’d grown up with didn’t wear anything, totally naked and exposed to the world. As a young woman going off to college on my own, it took me a while to learn the habits and rules of the privileged world. But I quickly realized I was not like most young women my age who commonly grow up protected and isolated from the mix of people. I saw many other young women putting up walls and enduring great difficulties of self-esteem and fear of speaking their opinions or accepting the odd or differing opinions of others. As a nation, we have sorted ourselves into specialties and surround ourselves only with our own kind and I wonder if the skill of being “a good judge of character” might not soon be a dying art.

Robin is now nearing seventy and still working winters on the fishing boats. But he got his passport back, and spends most summers in Cuba or Talum, Mexico. One summer it was Thailand. But after so many years living just under the skin of the world, he has contracted Hepatitis A, B, and C as well as tuberculosis. He’s lived through malaria multiple times in his long life. His health is bad, getting worse. I see him each year as he passes through, his skin taking on the gray pallor of the addict, the glaucoma giving his eyes a sheen that he can’t seem to see me around. There’s a terrible tremor to his hand. He has slowly begun to tell his stories and I’m afraid he’ll die before I tape record them. He spends all day in my parents’ spare bedroom, drinking cheap beer and reading thrillers off my mom’s bookshelf. She’s afraid he’s smoking cigarettes in bed. She’s afraid he’ll burn down the house when he cooks. They don’t share his bathroom and when he moves on each season they scour the house with bleach, my mom cussing, “Never again, never again,” under her breath as she cleans. He once told my dad it’s his dream, “to own a gun, a dog and a truck.” Even in old age, he aspires to a settled life and I wonder if he’ll ever have one. My parents are thinking of running utilities to an old travel trailer in their yard that my husband and I gave them years ago, a trailer we once used as a kitchen in our years living on the edge of the Painted Desert in our dome tent. My parents are negotiating the details, thinking things through, where the nearest water lines are, how much it will cost them, but never how much to charge. That R word—rent–never crosses their lips. They’ll do what they have to do to give an old man a place to die in the company of friends.

Melodie Edwards

Listen to “The Bird Lady” on NPR’s Selected Shorts

Safe Havens in Hard Times

Blogroll