Back in 1986, when I lived in Boston the first time, and after a condominium renovation had become endless and my wife had left me, and I had dropped out of night school, and getting laid off from my job seemed a definite possibility, I would walk around the city late at night handing my loose change to the men and women lining Arlington and Boylston near the park, or the doorways of Kenmore Square. I was hoping to buy some better luck I suppose, or maybe virtue to trade back later. God knows I needed a change.

You’ll say I should have saved my coin or bought a lottery ticket instead, because change was inevitable either way. I say, I went to bed feeling a little less sullied and a little more grateful for what I did have, and it’s rare that a small handful of quarters will buy you that.

This all comes to mind after meeting the guys a temp agency sent us to unload the moving van. After a last night in El Paso, in a La Quinta no less, though not one as delicious as north of Atlanta, we woke up early and made the final dash into Tucson to meet the moving van, arriving with 2 hours to spare, enough time just barely to call an agency and hire two guys to help us unload. At the end of the day, after 4 hours in triple digit temperatures, and a thorough soaking when a tiny little thunderstorm sidled over and spewed, these guys went home with $7/hour from the agency and a little extra I didn’t tell the agency about.

These guys sign in at the agency in the morning, arriving as early as possible to stand a better chance of a good place on the list, and then wait for the call. It’s marginally better than waiting on a street corner, something I remember from the years I lived in Los Angeles, but the agency gets half the money, and there’s still no assurance that the call will come. They are working, in any case, these two men, and they are poor. Strange to put a label ("poor") on two people that are no longer nameless or faceless. Strange and quite possibly insulting, categorizing, abstracting, sifting away their individuality.

That contrast between what little I can imagine of their life and what I know about my own, it gives a truly sordid “satisfaction”. Worse, it is based not on their real life, but on the life I imagine they have, a life I probably imagine in such a way as to maximize my own relief, that I am me and not them. Relief, not satisfaction.

Poverty and charity, the relationship between them, feels pretty simple. The emotions behind them suddenly feel very complicated.

Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine. ~Robert C. Gallagher

Levy says this on poverty in America, and the fact that large numbers of the poor are incarcerated in this country:
”And should we…conclude that [the US] has chosen to set up the penal state against that of the providential state, proposing a net of control that involves first police, then prison, as against a minimum income and guaranteed medical care? Of course not. I will not go so far as to say that. But that America is, just after Russia, the world champion of imprisonment is a fact. That it does not, however, actually have such a large number of major criminals incapable of rehabilitation into society is another fact. And that its prisons are participating in this way in a global system of producing and concealing, manufacturing and then condemning to invisibility, a population of the absolute poor, excluded from the space of the polis, who are turning into zombies, troglodytes-a physician would say “foreign bodies”-in a society that finds here the insurmountable defect in its armor and its image-that is a third fact, and one that is not the smallest result of my investigation”. (Levy, p245)

written by  roel krabbendam on July 30, 2007 from Tucson, United States
from the travel blog: Spare Change
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It is, I suppose, their privilege, but it strikes me as a foretaste of oblivion. Levy visited Sun City near Phoenix and wrote this:

“The problem, in short, is that all this implies a profound break with the very tradition of civic mindedness and civility-I won’t even say of compassion-that was responsible, and continues to be responsible, for this country’s greatness. And this experiment in privatizing a public space at the expense of a community cannot fail to create a terrible precedent…if we ratify the principle of this gilded ghetto based on membership in a certain age and income bracket, then by what right can we tomorrow prevent the development of cities forbidden to the old?...In whose name can we resist the definitive balkanization of American space that could well result? (Levy, p 129)

“…I leave Sun City with a feeling of unease, no longer knowing if you come here to save or to damn yourself, to banish death or savor a foretaste of it”. (Levy, p130)

Of course, the Balkanization of American space is an old story. North of Atlanta, the experience of the poor black in New Orleans, now this “retirement community”…all products of fear or preference or probably both. This distancing from the “Other” leaves me profoundly conflicted. Were these insular communities active in the production of culture: unique, rich and interesting lives contributing to some larger communal and inclusive vision, then it would scare me less. New Orleans may be the exception, but I do not think that this is what is going on.

Personally, for now because who knows what I'll feel like at 80, I choose the “Other”. I choose variety. I choose difference and conflict and friction, the new. I choose a challenge. I choose dialectic and synthesis without end, each new result juxtaposed with each new opposite and engaged in discovering a new synthesis. I choose change.

I will admit to waking up now with the unsettling knowledge that we have lost our moorings. It is a peculiar vertigo, if I may borrow one last thought from Levy. If it takes some time to figure out this new life however, if we encounter boredom and frustration and indifference and feelings of unease, if sometimes we look at each other and ask “what the hell were we thinking”?, at least we will know this: we are alive, we are engaged in the world, we are trying something new and we are actively searching and ultimately, we will find our way. I am sure of it.

written by  roel krabbendam on July 30, 2007 from Tucson, United States
from the travel blog: Spare Change
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Roadside restaurants

We are traveling, mind you, with two rambunctious dogs cooped up in a car all day: not every innkeepers dream guest. Most places added $10/dog to the bill if they accepted us at all.

Only the Red Roof Inn was disgusting, proving perhaps that corporate standards are no panacea, and the La Quinta north of Atlanta was absolutely wonderful. So wonderful, in fact, that when it came to finding a hotel in the Dallas area we dialed 411 to find another one along Rte.20, and were directed to Arlington, Texas where there were several. When we arrived however, tired from the 12 hour, 850 mile haul from Atlanta, they were completely full…all of them. Family reunions and visiting athletic teams had every single room. There was a moment there of…not despair really, but…uh.

With the help of the desk clerk, we landed instead at Best Western just down the street.

College students drinking beer on the corridor veranda outside our room kept waking us up.

900 Miles to go, on not very much sleep. It’s a big country.

Route 20 headed west

I’ve always wanted to visit New Orleans, and this trip seemed finally to offer that opportunity. Unfortunately, we changed our minds. Somewhere just north of Atlanta we realized we needed to be in Tucson within 2 days, and that’s a long, long way to go. 1,736.2 miles according to Yahoo Maps: 25 hours and 14 minutes of drive time. To get ready, we stopped at Polly’s college roommates house north of Atlanta and drank some of their fine scotch.

Levy celebrates Atlanta as a triumph of capitalism over racism, a “showcase of peaceful desegregation” (Levy, p.159), a city successful in elevating blacks into every nook and cranny of power where the mayor proclaims Atlanta “Too busy to hate”. Then he wonders, considering the enormous crimes perpetrated against blacks, if it isn’t a façade or willed forgetfulness, a decision not to bear witness. Our brief stop in the northern suburbs, where we actually see no blacks at all, begs the question “desegregation”?

So we changed our minds about visiting New Orleans.

I used to equate “changing my mind” with “failure”, but this led to a number of corollaries with disastrous implications. For example, on bicycle trips it became impermissible to ever retrace steps. This led to some fine(?) adventures in sodden farm fields, but also compounded navigational errors. In renovating condominiums, it became impermissible to sell before the renovation was complete. I learned some fascinating woodworking techniques, but the venture resulted in marital and financial toast. Now “changing my mind” gets filed with “breaking out of a rut” and/or “improved understanding”, and I work a lot harder at improving my understanding before making up my mind.

Anyway, while visiting New Orleans offered a textbook example of grappling with my current obsessing on “change”, going there seemed rather akin to shamelessly examining a car wreck or a cripple: we weren’t coming to help, we weren’t going to spend much money, and we weren’t staying long enough to achieve any real understanding.

Route 20 headed west

Bridge over the Mississippi River

Mississippi River

Route 20 Rest Area

Jim's BBQ and Catfish

Jim's BBQ and Catfish

Jim's BBQ and Catfish

Mia

Levy accuses Americans of collection without discernment, the museumification ofthe banal and a preference for modern simulation over historic artifact. “Defeat of the archive. Triumph of kitsch” (Levy, p29). Williamsburg would not dissuade him.

I see it more benevolently as the triumph of theater over dry facts, a movie culture rejecting 8th grade history class in favor of a little more drama. Who can blame them, these mythical average Americans? They didn’t have the benefit of Mr. Winslow Smith as an American History teacher, and for them it never really came alive. I read Mr. Smith’s obituary last year, and immediately his dry and dramatic manner came right back to me, 30 years now since I graduated from Junior High. For Mr. Smith, history was drama, and for one short school year I feel privileged to have heard and felt his point of view.

Mia

Mia

The letter for today, Elmo, is the letter C.

To the Romans it meant 100, but I’m thinking more about Consuming Caffeine and Copious Quantities (Cheating a bit there with the Q, I know) of Cholesterol, in Cheap Cafes, Cruising Cross-Country, in a Convertible (Car, not Castro…), to see Canyons, and Cactii…I originally named this trip Cholesterol, but I’m really thinking about Change. Colossal Change. After 10 years on the east coast, we are moving to tuCson.

Arizona.

No C. This essay would work so much better if we were moving to Connecticut, with 3.

We’ll be living near my mother and my brother. Otherwise, what’s the point in having them? My top secret master plan is to build a compound and install my entire family around me, so that later, when I’m older and even grouchier there will be lots of kids available to keep me focused on something other than my impending demise.

Thinking strategically here, people: focusing on the future.

What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Among other reasons for leaving our life here behind is a sinking feeling that our efforts to get ahead left us simply elsewhere in a maze of corridors all the same. It is an awkward kind of security, knowing too much about tomorrow. For all of our striving with time ticking by, one place looks and feels exactly like the last, each day the same, no sense whatsoever of progress beyond an accumulation of gray hair. We suffered from a diminution of hope, a hardening of our habits, a clotting of our vital juices, a cholesterol of the psyche.

Hope requires faith in the possibility of change, and change is what we’re betting on to restore our trust in the future. It seems slightly archaic or simply naïve to believe in change, as if we wouldn’t be dealing with ourselves whether we moved or not. Perhaps this is a way, on the other hand, not to find ourselves but to lose ourselves, or to get beyond ourselves: to fuss less in any case about our own nest and pay more attention to the horizon…and what better place, than the wide open space, of the wild, walmart west? West, with no C.

For Sale. $399,800. Acton’s original 1798 Schoolhouse. Now 3 bedrooms and 1½ baths.
The schoolhouse is right on the town common, and the town mows the front yard.
The Town Hall and the Library are right down the street.
The schools are some of the best in the state.