Black Friday

Last Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, I was waiting near Sunset Square for a bus back home after completing my usual boring errands, when it suddenly struck me that car traffic was abnormally normal. Normally on Black Friday around the freeway exits, Bellis Fair, and all the shopping centers in town, traffic jams are so bad that buses are re-routed to approach the north transit center in Cordata by a back way, so we don't end up with most of the bus system jammed up along with the cars. Parking lots are usually crowded with cars with blue and white BC plates. This year it was so un-crowded it was a little scary.

Another woman waiting at the stop, on her way home from work at K-Mart, said the store had been busy the afternoon of Thanksgiving, Grey Thursday, but the crush was all over. Maybe the Canadians, and everyone else, stayed home to shop on-line instead. News reports are still saying it was the best opening-day ever.

Let's hope. Let's hope we can have a prosperous, profitable and generous holiday season, without any greedy, materialist, consumerist craziness.

Bread & Soup

Bread and soup and salad will be my menu for Thanksgiving, following an afternoon at work, at time-and-a-half pay. My dinner menu will be a little austere because I lost my wallet last week, with most of my ID, ATM and credit cards, and my EBT card. The credit and debit cards were replaced in a few days, along with a new social security card and a temporary driver's license, but the EBT card is still in the mail (this is the magic plastic that replaces the old paper food stamps, in case anyone doesn't recognize the acronym). I'm very glad that I was carrying my keys and bus pass in my pockets, so I was able to get home and indoors on a cold, rainy evening. Would have been an utterly miserable experience otherwise.

Losses like this sometimes leave me considering how slight a person's hold on their place in the world can be. I've felt this after losing jobs, and during my landlord troubles, every time I came home to find another notice posted on my door, and especially the evening I came home from work to find the lock had been changed.

And those little paper and plastic bits with the numbers and ciphers are like keys that you need to get and keep your place. I've often felt that with no job and no home, I'd be a nobody from nowhere, and without my cards and papers there would be no chance of coming back.

Sometimes I brood and worry too much and get myself into an awful state, but with the holidays coming up, I want to ask everyone who hasn't (yet) experienced any of this, to please for a little while try to imagine yourself displaced from everything you own and do, from every place you felt welcome, with no job title, no bank accounts or paychecks, no place to sleep, no car or phone or email. And then remember not to judge people who are going without these things.

Trick or Treat

Halloween evening was stormy, rainy and windy. I returned home from work late, wet and cold, but glad I had new shoe covers, so I didn't have to empty rainwater out of my shoes on the doorstep before bringing my bike inside the apartment. I had just finished removing the panniers, had shaken the rain and road grit from my bike, and taken off my baggy rain pants and jacket, when there was a knock on the door. Not a childish knock, fortunately because I was really not in the mood to face a bunch of cute little candy-beggars, but a mature, gentle yet virile knock.

I pulled the door open a few inches. There on the doorstep was my very attractive, mature yet virile new neighbor, Alonzo. We had met and talked briefly a few times before, when he admired my bicycle. He'd said he used to be a cyclist, hadn't ridden in many years, but would very much like to ride again. Now here he was, standing on my doorstep, with a jug of Chianti in one hand and a warm, covered plate balanced in the other.

"Hello," he said. "I heard you come in from the storm and thought you would enjoy some chicken penne pasta with crusty, buttery garlic bread, a fresh green salad, and a bit of wine."

"Yes, come in, please," I replied, forgetting about my stringy wet hair and red nose, almost forgetting to close the door behind him. "Of course. Excuse me while I take off the rest of my clothes . . . "

ok, maybe not really.