Remembering mom, who never got her home
We’re standing in what, this being Tucson, I want to call a wash, though it’s really a drainage ditch. Not 2 miles from my house, the swale is strewn with debris; tire inner tubes litter the ground like black intestines.
To one side, a woman crouches behind a fence, barefoot in the cold. She ducks her head as our team leader conducts the survey, copies of which we all carry as volunteers for Everybody Counts!, Tucson’s annual tally of the homeless.
Were I my mother on this morning I’m standing in a ditch — 47 days past my 44th birthday — I’d be dead. By now they would have conducted the autopsy, by now the newspaper spread that showed Wisconsin’s Machickanee Forest at dawn would have run. Before that, if I were my mother, the afternoon horseback riders would have spotted my body.
Two nights earlier I was strangled in the tavern. And before I’d left to tend bar — that would have been the evening I last saw my 15year-old daughter.
In preparation for the count, volunteers assembled at a local church. Housing and Urban Development, trainers explained, would be using our numbers to determine funding. As a reward to participants, we’d be handing out $5 McDonald’s gift cards.
Two researchers role-played the survey. One asked the other her name, her age, where she’d slept. “Were you alone?” she asked. The pretend homeless woman paused before saying, “No, my daughter was with me.”
We think of the homeless as single adults — that’s whom we see huddled in doorways or holding a cardboard sign that reads “God Bless.”
But of course there are homeless families. They’re hard to count, though. Look for cars with blankets over the windows, a trainer says.
We were never homeless — my mother, my younger sister and me. As my mother said, “At least you have a roof.” When I was small she’d worked the jobs she could get with a high school diploma. Later, she got a two-year degree and a better job.
Laid off from that job, she pieced together an existence out of subsidized apartments, unemployment and food stamps. As things got worse instead of better, mom began working at the bar, another hole-in-the-wall on South Broadway in Green Bay.
It’s hard to say why I’ve volun- teered for the count this year. But perhaps it’s because my husband and I have so resoundingly “homed” ourselves over the past two years as we restored a derelict 1890s rowhouse.
It was an enormous undertaking, yet ever since we stepped into what is now our yard and stood staring at mesquite branches against honeyed adobe bricks, we’d been goners.
Our team heads downtown. Two men rolled in moving blankets don’t want to be surveyed, so I fill out observation forms. People trickle in — word has spread we have gift cards. A man asks to be surveyed — I’m hungry, he says. He was a roofer until he injured his back. Now he sleeps in abandoned houses.
A homeless guy once lived in our house, too. Surely he stayed in the kitchen, the one room with a wood stove, and watched the flames flicker against the dark.
South Broadway was lined with falling-down houses, places working-class families had left to people who couldn’t afford better. We envied them. My mother had always dreamed of someday having a “real” house.
I talk with men who slept under the interstate, a young woman with pimples and schizophrenia. Another box of supplies has arrived when I see them: A woman and a girl. The woman has walked up, eager to get a gift card, anything.
She says she’s 30 and they’ve been homeless about a week. As we talk her daughter twirls. She’s three, her mother says. The girl looks upward; it’s like petals opening to reveal a pink face amid curls. We finish, and already there are no more cards. The mother accepts a pair of athletic socks instead, grasping them tightly with both hands.
Our house stands in the heart of one of Tucson’s oldest districts. It’s a tired expression, yet it feels like that: We are in the city’s heart, and within it beats our house. Just blocks away beat two shelters.
Shelter: from the Old English meaning “to shield.” From what do we shield ourselves? To what do we open? Why am I here, on this morning when I could be dead? Because I have a house and they don’t. Because my mother wanted a house and never got one. Because home is another word for love.
It’s a tired expression, yet it feels like that: We are in the city’s heart, and within it beats our house. Just blocks away beat two shelters.