“Unknown.”

That’s what it read on the first ring and, as always, it would read the same until it went to voice mail.

After all, I was in the tenth frame of a high game with two strikes, preparing for another and a solo celebration of my personal best at a game I haven’t played in years, but from the looks of things, I should probably resume.

I haven’t answered an Unknown caller since September 4, 2011. That was the day I made a pivotal life decision, ending 8 years of a hellish crystal methamphetamine habit which had taken everything I own, and then some, including a squeaky clean criminal record. Feel free to read my backstory at http://www.lifemeanssomuch.com/my-9-1-1/ now or later to get the ugly truth of the darkened life I lead for so many years and would again be reminded of today.

Yet, at the top of my game in a noisy bowling hall, a still small voice instructed me to answer this divine call.

“Hello?”

It was Siri.

Well, the Federal Board of Prisons Siri giving me the option of accepting or rejecting the incoming call from a John _______, a name I either didn’t recognize from her automated pronunciation or the ambient noise of the bowling hall.

I accepted the call.

“Hello?”

“Don? This is John, remember me?”

He’d said his last name the way I’d remembered it at least six years ago.

I dropped the ball and collapsed into the chair.

Had it been one of my three kids, I might have been less shocked.  But I’d spoken to all of them this week and they were doing fine at work and relationships and unlike their dad, were mostly not criminally inclined as I had once been, and still very squeaky clean. At least to a father’s knowledge.

“How are you?” is probably the most useless opening question in any conversation, especially one with this inmate who’d been incarcerated 21 months to date. I’d heard stories about prison and they’re not just true, they’re much worse.

“I’ve been trying to find your number for years to reach you,” he continued on a call that was being timed and recorded at the Lompoc, California Federal Correctional Facility.

“Well, here I am,” is probably the second most useless thing to say, but I was speechless as to the nature of the call from this dear friend who, like me, had once immersed himself in the drug trade as deep as the Mexican cartel, but apparently, from the call, hadn’t escaped the consequences.

For about six years, we both knew our endings in the business wouldn’t be pretty. Either we’d end up in prison or very, very dead.  The world of crystal meth and upline suppliers are unforgiving, unpredictable and outright crazy. Several times, I narrowly escaped being murdered either by a skinny crackhead for a $20 bag or in negotiations on bulk purchases from Mexican men who, not surprisingly, all went by Jose or Freddy.

I had been arrested in the city’s biggest drug bust of the month several years ago in a sting where they confiscated tens of thousands in a variety of drugs and tens of thousands in cash I’d amassed from the business I began purely by accident.  I faced 25 years of a mandatory prison sentence for high level trafficking but for the grace of God, subsequent immediate life changes, and even more grace, I’d escaped.  And not in the El Chapo way.  It was a profession I never wanted in the first place.  John had not been so lucky.  He’d left the country to avoid prosecution but years later had apparently been apprehended in a surprise visit by US marshals who brought him home to face his crimes and penalties which had landed him a cold cell in a federal penitentiary for the past two years.

I learned of these things in this short conversation which surely wouldn’t be our last on the topic.

You see, despite the fact we both were addicts and dealers, we genuinely liked each other.  We “worked” together often and even spent social time talking about the good men we used to be and not finding answers to why we were doing what we were doing nor how we ended up in the business.  Both of us were secretly ashamed of our habits and our livelihood which depended on keeping people high enough to lose everything, including their families and jobs, and low enough to often lose their dignity.

By now, we were well into the important topics of the quickly elapsing conversation.  He was to be released at the end of March and wondered if he could count on me for a ride to wherever home and a new clean life might be found. I said of course to all his requests, for he was a man who had my back countless times I don’t even dare detail here for lack of time and words to explain the loyalty, brotherly love and support I experienced at the hands and rescue of this man at pivotal moments of my drug-dealing days. Suffice to say, It was the kind of unwavering support I hadn’t even experienced from a brother in church after a lifetime of serving God which, for many years, I’d placed on hold.

Having time for our histories later on, we’d made the necessary connections of his information and my commitment to be there for him upon release as he had been so many times for me.

If I hadn’t answered the divine call that morning in a loud bowling alley at the peak of my final game, I’d have missed forever the chance to fix something that has haunted me for years and was part of a Fourth Step I never did. And not because I didn’t want to.

“It’s really good to hear your voice, Don.”

I reciprocated as we hung up, knowing that this was to be one of those nodal, memorable events in my continuing life of recovery and promised a sober opportunity for both of us to reunite, unenhanced, to re-experience those virtues in one another that we’d only seen through the obscurity of a methamphetamine haze for so many years.

Ball in hand, I stared down the lane like a villain, armed with 14 pounds and a rather large smile. I rolled my third strike, a perfect final frame, and my day’s personal best.

Funny thing, nowadays, when my life seems at its lowest, the most comforting statement I can make to myself is:

“Don, you could be in prison.”

Such was the situation today, when I answered a divine call from the Unknown.

“You got a card,” said my boss on her rounds about the office as she tossed a small pink envelope with no return address on my desk at lunchtime. Busy working through the hour on a frustrating case, I could have easily lost it amid the tsunami of scattered papers I call my desk.
By the time I was finished, I’d added another wave of debris to the stack but the little pink corner peeked out among the mess as if it had climbed itself to the top not to go unnoticed. I grabbed it with my left and gulped a sip of cold coffee with my right.
Nobody sends me cards here. A pink one at that.
It being just a few days from Valentine’s Day, I sniffed it for perfume but it smelled just like a card, so tossed it back and went to lunch.
The day had been merciless at our little non-profit that helps people stay housed, fed and plugged in to utilities at critical times of their lives when nobody else cares. Much of my morning had been spent on such a case, but I returned from the sandwich shop with a ham and cheese and what I thought might be a solution.
As usual, a dozen more urgent memos had made their way onto my desk during that half hour away but the corner of that same pink envelope had again risen up like a phoenix as if begging to be opened. I notice things like that. My desk is always a fire hazard but I keep snapshots of it in my mind for times like this and I knew the card was no longer buried where I had left it just 30 minutes earlier.
No return address, I opened it, finding a note inscribed:
“I just want to thank you for all that you do for me. I don’t seem to find the time to say it enough but I will always remember this day.”
That was it. No salutation. No signature. No return address. Nothing.
I held the card and eased back in my chair like Sherlock Holmes, attempting to recognize the penmanship or some other mark that might reveal the sender’s identity, but no cigar.
It was at that moment I became infected.
So many names, cases and contacts I have made in this job over the years. I suppose it could have come from any one of them, or all of them for that matter. I let my mind sort through the rolodex of memories and in doing so, I smiled, realizing the absolute brilliance of this one anonymous pink author.
He or she wasn’t satisfied with just paying it forward as so many are noticed these days. Buying someone’s coffee or meal, pitching in a buck when someone comes up short at the checkout…all wonderful displays of a caring humanity, but the power held in this tiny, pink, anonymous card trumped them all.
Its anonymity had the power to change the world, or at least one person’s perspective of it.
For the remainder of the day, while doing my work, I calculated so many names and faces of possible senders and individual reasons for their thankfulness. It could have been pretty much any one of them. By 6pm when I walked out of my office for home, the experience had changed me.
The cluelessness of that little lunchtime mystery had put a smile on my face that stayed there in the background all afternoon.
That brilliant anonymous author of the pink envelope never meant to be known.
They meant to be Anyone or Everyone.
I tucked the pink card from Anyone in the corner of my bulletin board, turned out my light, and said goodbye to everyone.
It was a lovely ending to a difficult week.
And I started the weekend with a smile and a stop at the store to pick up my own blank little pink card and a postage stamp.

“I can be very frugal, you’ll see,” she muttered with shaking lips and swollen eyes, like I’d asked her to perform some miraculous feat for my own well-being.

She’d failed to grasp this morning’s grave news.

Each of her 84 years sat across from me with sticky, cataracted  eyes that began welling last evening  in anticipation of our early morning meeting.  Though her dignity is intact, by April or sooner she will be another statistic in a sad, lonely and forgotten column.  I did the math several times, either because she didn’t believe me that she wasn’t going to make it, or perhaps because I didn’t want to believe it myself.

Each time was the same. A budget difference of -$123 a month, with nothing left to cut out but food.

Breaking the news to a poor old woman who’d worked 60 years of a hard life that she will soon be homeless because her meager income and more meager expenses will outpace each other within a few short months was heartbreaking.

I packed up my things at the site where, twice weekly, I am their savior.

I try to help fixed income seniors in crisis make it to the next day, the next week, the next month, and into the next birthday if they can last that long.

I overshot the right turn to my office to go somewhere to be with my thoughts and worries for this widowed woman long since abandoned in this desert by her family to “retire.”

“I’ll have the lemon chicken with steamed rice,” ordering from Jone, the tiny Asian waitress at my favorite Chinese hole in the wall on Water Street. I couldn’t return to work just yet with a wet, puffy-eyed face like this and a story like that, so this was my safe house for 30 minutes or so.

She knows me. I’m there a few times a month at least. She asked if I was okay. I said yes.  She asked how my mom was doing and I said she was good, too. She brought my won ton soup and crunchy noodles and a Sprite and thought it best to leave me alone in my unusual condition.

I wondered if it is easier for a doctor to break the news to someone with a catastrophic illness that would eventually take their life than to break the news to someone that they won’t actually die, but will soon be spending their remaining years somewhere cold in the winter, hot in the summer and without an address.

Lunch arrived, saving me from the next blubbering wave of awareness that sometimes, I’m no savior at all.  I can only do so much, and sometimes, in a rare instance, it’s not enough.

I re-lived her pleading face across the table as I picked at lunch, wiped my face and mouth, and composed myself to get back to the office to staff this situation with my bosses in hopes that together we could arrive at some solution, if not at least temporarily.

The $8.60 check was $13 with a generous tip to Jone for letting me be for the half-hour lunch. I laid the cash on the check and unwrapped the fortune cookie:

“You will be happy with the results of your work today.”

It could have easily read:

“There is a Savior, Don, and it’s not you.”

It’s been a long time since she asked for my coffee club card. It’s  at least a couple years now since the young mother with the pink streaked hair stopped asking.  I used to know her name long ago when she started working the 11pm to 7am shift at the seedy convenience store I visit every morning about 430am for a $1.62 cup and a chat about important things.

This morning was a little different.

I pulled up and walked in at the expected time and performed my cream and coffee ritual. She was making fresh pots when we picked up where we left off at the same time yesterday morning in the dark when the store is always empty of customers save the same old nameless homeless guy out front whose hand I always shake as I walk in.

“How’s the kids?” I asked, as she was scooping grounds and wiping up the creamy drips of someone before me. “Oh they’re good, Josh started basketball and we had another birthday for him on Saturday” she replied as we often opened with updates on her family.  She took the night shift so she could be home when they wake up to get them off to school like a ‘regular’ mom. She lives just down the street, an easy walk to and from a job that can’t pay more than $11.25 an hour, which has surely gone up a couple bucks since we first met, if not for her job performance then at least for her change in countenance.

Over the years, we’ve talked about many things. Important things.  She’s read all the 150 stories on my website at least a couple times each and asks me to tell her when I have a new one.  Right about now, she’s probably reading this and surprised to be my topic of the day.

Well, it’s because this morning was a little different.

Our daily devotions together often focus on the themes of my stories about life change, inspiration, humor and paying things forward when we are able. Over the years, we both have changed, but hers has been nothing but remarkable.  The pink streaks are still there, as are the multiple piercings that decorate her face, but she’s not the same angry person I met a couple years ago. I have since wondered if our ten minutes a day over coffee could have helped to change the bitterness of a young single mother into the charming, cheerful young lady she’s since become.

And then she shared with me evidence that our chats had, indeed, been a buoy for a lot longer and a lot more than I’d realized.

Today’s topic centered on some things I needed to do as soon as I arrived at the office that would determine if a few clients will have food for the coming weekend or not and how, in that sense, my job is very rewarding.

Coffee made and winding up our brief morning ritual, she shared with me something pretty incredible.

“You know, you’ve racked up a lot of free coffee over the past couple years.”

I acknowledged that I had but that I’ve never been good at keeping track of it.

Apparently, she had.

“Every time I used to ask for your coffee club card, you always joked and told me to put it in my job description to keep a running tab.  I know you’ll never redeem the cards and the every 6^th cup free bonus, so I hope you don’t mind what I’ve done,” she began explaining, asking for my indulgence with an endearing, sheepish grin she’d gradually grown since we’d been friends.

“John out there has been my homeless friend for a long time.  And since you don’t use your coffee club bonuses, I’ve been using them to buy him a small coffee and a donut whenever he shows up.  And we talk about important things together before he leaves, just like you and I do every morning.  I’ve read him some of your stories and heard pretty much everything about his life there is to know.”

I smiled and said I liked her style and think she’s doing a noble thing with my coffee rewards and to keep it up.

She’s a different young woman than I met a couple years ago. She shares better stories of her kids and is quite optimistic about their future as a family. Mostly though, her face glows each morning and she has a smile that makes me forget about all the piercings to see how beautiful she’s become inside.

Time was up. I had to get to work to get some people fed for the weekend, and to write this story.

I paid my $1.62 and said thanks until tomorrow.

And as I walked out, I again shook the hand of a homeless man as I had so many times before..

But this time, I thanked him and called him by name.

Today was the first time I’ve ever seen his smile.

I wish I’d planned better,

worked longer, took the other job, done this and not that.

I wish I’d had someone to tell me what today would look like.

I wish I hadn’t called in sick, took that fall, been more careful at certain things

and more careless at others.

I wish I’d been able to see the world, see my grandchildren, see my lover one last time.

I wish I’d stayed in the game, away from those of some people and closer to others.

I wish I’d lived when I had the chance and taken chances that made me feel alive when I had them to spend.

I wish I could go back in time and take the road less traveled more often or simply, traveled more.

I wish I had more wishes that came true and that I’d been more true to myself.

I wish I’d given more instead of giving up more often.

I wish it wasn’t over when I still have beginnings left.

I wish I’d dwelt on cliffs instead of valleys, nows instead of maybes and I wish I’d been more aware.

I wish it wasn’t so quiet and dark and moist and blurry. And I wish it wasn’t so red.
And I wish I’d kept my eyes on the road
instead of my phone,
and had more time
for a better final wish
than that.

Hundreds of groups
and cancer societies,
“Fun” runs for the cause
So many varieties.

Medical remedies,
And pills by the score
Injections and treatments
But wait…so much more.

Diets and lifestyles
Eat this and not that
Exercise, energize
And warnings like that.

Tobacco and sugar
Red meat, even chicken
Too much or too little
And you mght be stricken.

Research and politics
Pharma conspiracies
Media stories that
No one ever sees.

The answer to cancer
The cure and the healing
Is out there somewhere
But no one’s revealing.

So deaths by the millions
Are an agony still
Marching undaunted
Continuing to kill.

By random selection
Genetics or chance
The villain arrives
And takes the last dance.

So stand up and speak out
Condemning on cue
And pardon the French but
My answer to cancer:

Fuck you.

Dear Mom.
It’s Christmastime andI think I’m going crazy.
I’m getting ready to hang the kids’
stockings and it’s been murder
decorating the tree so tonight I’m gonna have to knock myself out
to finish up before I go to bed. I have a sharp knife
to trim the extra branches and a loaded gun
of hot glue for the ornaments. I’d like to end it all
by around 10pm before I go on a rampage
cleaning the kitchen. I’m sure you’re just as sick
of the holidays like me and will shoot me
a return email in the New Year!
Meanwhile, tonight I need to be committed
even if it kills me.
Merry Christmas!
Your son.

I  hit the jackpot.

Double nickels.

At 4:21pm this Thanksgiving day,  I officially join the ranks of a population I’ve served for the last two years at a job I love. It’s a cohort which has inspired more stories on my website than any other life experience to date. And I’ve had my share.

Butch (my dog and resolute Facebook icon) shares my birthday, entering his third year on four legs. Our “Thanksbirthday” celebration (I tried “Birthgiving,” but it sounds like a bloody placenta–which is kinda gross–though I understand there are some cultural traditions known for eating one now and then,  and if I don’t stop here,  I’m gonna barf a pumpkin pie) will be with family and friends…and festivities most will enjoy and appreciate this holiday.

Most.

Across town,  generous Thanksgiving  workers will be sweating the stuffing that matters.  St. Thomas More Catholic Community is carrying out their part of a huge mutual tradition we began together 20 years ago delivering meals to 800 senior citizens who have neither family, food nor invitations elsewhere. Casa de Luz is feeding 600 families, ministering deep within the district of the desolate Naked City.  Indeed, across America, prompted by the abundances in their ovens and on their tables, kitchen cooks will find themselves inspired to extend spontaneous invitations to strangers and almost forgotten others, and will send them off with leftovers and homespun experiences most never had and many never will again.

Every breath I take is a moment growing older. I hyperventilated once in February and lost count but I still calculate 55 years breathing and I am more alive today than ever before. This past year, some have lost that gift and the many who remain will spend some part of the day and much of the ensuing season lost in fond memories and teardrops that will decorate their brittle little Christmas trees.  Older now, I find life is a lot less a celebration of another year or another holiday than the simple thankfulness that I’m still very much alive to write this short story for your Thanksgiving day.

Writing stories for people is my passion. Today, this one marks the 150^th on my website. And as usual, I’ll be posting shorter ones on Facebook for followers to catch a laugh or two.  I will also be thinking about my dad and others who will enjoy breathless feasts in a faraway place somewhere at a table which will soon hold a place setting bearing my name, and indeed, will take my own breath away and not make me fat.

But while I’m alive, I write my stories and breathe life into those around me just as are those servants across town at this very moment.

Stories sparked by inspirations are gifts to those who need reminded that someone cares. The season for making memories is now in high gear.  For me, it’s not because it’s our birthday, my official entry into senior citizenship and the dreamy discounts at restaurants, nor is it because it’s Thanksgiving.  It’s because I’m not yet a corpse. And that’s pretty remarkable if you ask me considering the life I once lived.

So, as the parishioners of St. Thomas, the servants at Casa de Luz, and the many quiet summons from early morning cooks in country kitchens everywhere, I will extend an invitation to the uninvited, hoping to breathe life into someone and to write a truly unforgettable chapter in their lonely life.

Indeed, bigger things are happening in our world today. Much bigger than birthdays or birds on dinner tables. Yet in the midst of the daily news, the best  human kindness begins with an invitation and a pen to author generosity in the life of someone who really needs some. That’s how love works.

I tell my stories using words as tools to warm breathing hearts.

Yours can easily be with a place setting a hot meal.

Happy Thanksbirthday to my dog and me, and happy human kindness to all who still have breath and life and a hot meal to share with someone.

LMSM, Don