The Mayor of D Street

 

On several occasions I lived in Bellingham, Washington, a little city with as many remarkable folk per square yard as one will find anywhere.  Twice I lived in a community of sorts. The first was an 'intentional' community, although the intention beyond arguing about duck ponds was never entirely clear.  This was during my prime kayaking years, and I built a little hut at the edge of the property to hole up for the winters.  I actually subleased it during the summers, when I was out in my kayak.  I was the only person in the community who was not too enlightened to drink coffee, so I had my breakfast nearly every morning at Tony's in Fairhaven.  It was a wonderful place to meet remarkable folk; in fact I lived at the Oasis because of one particularly remarkable young man whom I met there.  

But, one of my best friends at the Oasis wanted to move to a more 'spiritual' community, so we rented a house in the Lettered Streets neighborhood.  A friend of mine from Santa Fe joined us.  He took the second bedroom while I pitched my tent in the shrubbery.  In a series of events too complicated for this blog post, one friend had a fatal brain tumor, the Santa Fe fiend and I moved to a small house where we sort of provided a hospice for our dying friend, and then we were absorbed by a 'Christian community' which was just across an alley from our first house together.  Everyone there drank coffee, but no so constantly as I. During this time my office hours were at at a coffee shop called I think 'F Street'.  And, during this time we hosted 'Soup Night' every Thursday.  I bought a pound of Ethiopian Moka Harar and a huge loaf of bread and made a pot of soup and waited to see who would come.  It was a wonderful mix of folks who showed up.  Besides my soup, someone usually brought deset, and there were children and dogs and discussions of just about everything from the likelihood of encountering other intelligent life in the universe to the symbolism in Cohen Brothers movies.  Sometimes people spent the night.

And sometimes there was a stand-up comic, Jim.  I had met Jim at the F Street Coffee Shop.  Those were the days when people often read books n coffee shops, with fairly public titles, instead of being all private on our computer screens.  I don't remember what I was reading that caught Jim's attention, but it turned out that he had read just about everything.  He was a 6' 4" graduate of Creighton University in Omaha, and a product of Jesuit junior seminary before that, and he was making Ignatius proud.   We became good fiends, and I found that he was homeless.  Well, technically, his home was a Chevrolet  Nova parked on D Street, a sort of neighborhood of homeless folk.   And Jim was the popularly acclaimed mayor of the neighborhood.  If there were any trouble, the sight of Jim and his baseball bat quickly squelched it.

If I knew how Jim had become homeless, and sue I did, I have forgotten that part of his story.  He ended to pepper his conversation with 'as Father Someone used to say'.  Besides, homelessness is rather relative.  Jim did have his Chevrolet, after all.  I knew other homeless folks in Bellingham who had nothing more than the clothes they were wearing.  And I met one couple at the coffee shop who had become millionaires by day-trading and were selling their house and fixing up a Toyota van as their next home.  The last I heard of them, they had gone to Alaska from Bellingham and then to Marfa, Texas, a destination town for remarkable people.

While I knew Jim, he found a job through another parishioner at Assumption parish.  He became a cleaner of porta-potties.  He was able to afford an apartment.  The last time I visited him he lived in quite a nice apartment not far from his job site. It was, if I remember correctly, on B Street. Besides the humour that was so popular at Soup Nights, Jim was always up for a good conversation about any topic so long as it wasn't gossip.

It has been thirteen years or so since I lived in Bellingham, and I had mostly forgotten Jim until I saw the bench in the photo above.  It is the 'home' of a man who does not have a Chevrolet, or apparently even a tent.  He spends much of the days sitting on that bench, and sometimes when I ride into town early ride hoe late, I see him in his sleeping bag, so I assume he spends the nights there also.  I have never been bold enough to introduce myself and ask how he came to live there.  He reads a lot of books.  I wonder if he, too, is a wandering son of Ignatius.

I tried to call Jim to see what has happened since last we spoke, but the number I have is no longer in service.