alarm clock?
I took the photo at 5:05 this morning. Only later saw another reading.
According to Google: Many think "SOS" stands for "save our souls" or "save our ship," but it actually doesn't stand for anything. SOS is a Morse Code distress signal. Morse Code is a system that uses dots, dashes and spaces to communicate letters and numbers.May 12, 2023
Back to the time. Most of my closest neighbors are older, probably retired, women with cars with mufflers. There are a few, however, guys with trucks, loud, unmuffled trucks, who get up for work early. Now that it's getting cold they like to (or need to) warm up their trucks before they get going. Across the street started at 5:01, and was pulling out when I took the photo of my clock across the room.
Four minutes of loud in the dark. Almost rattle the windows loud. All is vibration.
When I am one of those enlightened beings, saints, bodhisattvas, whatchacallems, my first thought will be: bless his day with everything he needs, and joy. My first thought this morning was: JHChrist, and I'm even deaf! It was not prayer. But the good news is that it only took a little over a minute before I got to the blessing, glad he has a job, etc. That's progress, not perfection. Call it good enough for today.
Back to the SOS. Save Our Souls. Save Our Ships. Nothing.
Several blocks up the hill is the SOS (Seasonal Overnight Shelter) run by SPIN (Supporting People in Need) and housed in a large metal building formerly the office building for the defunct pellet factory next door. Next to the public works yards. The nearest neighbors to the SOS have been outraged since it opened – early in the Covid epidemic – both because some shelter residents have damaged their property and intruded on their sense of safety, and because this is one of the historically Mexican neighborhoods and "they put it here because they think we're the bad neighborhood." (Full disclosure: at the time the building was bought to house the SOS I was married to the landlady. I know for sure that the 'bad neighborhood' idea was not part of our thinking. SPIN wanted an office building suitable for overnight occupancy in the cold season. That it turned into a 24/7 operation, food and all, was a surprise to me.)
The street I live on gets lots of foot traffic, people headed from the SOS downtown, maybe to the Mission for breakfast. And then uphill later. I say hello. Usually they greet me back. Sometimes someone is talking to someone invisible. Sometimes people just walk by. I've never been hurt, or threatened by someone from the SOS.
Now it's midday and someone's at the door. Lacey Winborn, Pastor Waldo's wife, inviting me to Thanksgiving dinner across the street at the Brewer Hill Missionary Baptist Church. I put on a clean shirt and hustle over. The praying has already been done when I get there.
Chat turns to the SOS. Is that the same as SPIN? Well, SPIN runs a lot of programs and the SOS is one of them. Is it true that they go to prisons and move people here so they can be their payees and then push them out on the streets and keep their money and that's why there are so many more homeless people in town?
Deep breath. They do have a program, next to the KofC (we no longer have a Kentucky Fried Chicken in town, so KFC always means the Knights of Columbus) which is for men out of prison, but it's small and I doubt that the rumor is true.
Talk turns to two longtime neighborhood residents, now displaced by code enforcement and episodes in jail. He's living in The Jungle. We got a lock for our water tap after (the other) he kept 'borrowing' ten gallons a day to take to his squat.
No, we don't have to import homeless people.
Back home, I see that the Saturday paper is still in the driveway. Soggy. And here comes the carrier to collect for the month. Front page news is Pat Cano's recognition for getting an overnight warming center going last winter in the Old Rec Center – a few blocks uphill, and not too far from the SOS. More to that story than will fit here. But zoom in on the text. Pat 's family home is near the SOS. She no longer lives there, partly because it was broken into five times. Last winter, one evening at the warming center, we finally had The Conversation about the SOS that hadn't happened for three years. Pat concluded that we could work together. Maybe next week the warming center will be opening again.
to be continued....
