I wonder if this will be the last time I flip her calendar, change her sheets or pull the weeds from her garden. Buy her groceries, get her lunch, or pay her back for all she’s been to me. Run her errands, walk at her side, or hold her hand during one of her spells. I’ll miss playing my jokes on her, winning her smiles, and losing every hand of gin. But the day will soon come when I empty her closets, filled with fond memories and a deep void for all the days I remain. But as I laugh through the tears and chuckle at the moments, I will always smile because while something is now missing, nothing is ever lost.

“Size 7 if you can, but really, anything will do.”

Noticeably ashamed and even more embarrassed about the ask, she walked out with the same uneven pain, now made a little worse that her secret had been discovered.

I hope I never have to ask a stranger for a newer pair of old shoes.

Tattered by the years and scissor trimmed around the flattened soles, she still brushed them each morning and treated them like the blessings they were for carrying her through the day.  Her only pair for as long as she can remember, I had done the unthinkable and asked if they were comfortable, knowing well enough they were now so worn, they were probably permanently injuring her feet and needed replaced with money from someone else.

But humility. A woman from the south learns early on the decorum of it.  You always meet the needs of others and never ask for yourself.  I’d met with her a few times and each visit hurt me to see her walk like that.  She had no money for clothing or shoes. She was budgeting just enough to keep the lights on and some food in the pantry.  So I had to ask the question. If not for her, to relieve my own pain.

But compassion. A man in the business of helping old southern women past their humilities and into a new pair of shoes was worth breaking the southern Georgia rules she’d lived with most of her 89 years.

“Size 7 it is, with a low heel and a sturdy new sole,” I told her. “You need say no more, and nobody else will know. We will never speak of this again, okay?” I assured her and she agreed with a nod.

I never shopped for women’s shoes before. A couple times with my Mom, sure, but this excursion was a secret mission to find a fit and style that would last an old woman the rest of her years and in which she would very likely be buried.  That thought alone made the trip to the store on a Friday morning an emotional one.

I could have shopped Goodwill for a bargain, but this pair was to be an investment that comes in a new box stuffed with the clean white tissue and plastic wrap intact upon delivery for her to open and waft the new leather scent which she would do for at least an hour before trying them on.

She’d lived a hard life. Worked for 60 years at the same job, probably in those same shoes, and retired on a social security income that barely paid her monthly rent and left $123 for everything else.  But she always said she was doing fine and was in no need until I’d spied the pair of shoes that her withered ankles were poured into and the gait that wasn’t because she was old, but because she was prideful and in pain.

Black goes with everything. Well stitched, sturdy thick soled like waitresses wear when they’re on their feet for an entire shift, and $62.30 with tax after the coupon, it was less than the cost of a single lunch for two and much more satisfying.

I showed up at her door unannounced, hung the bag on the handle and went to work.

When I see her again, I will say nothing of the shoes, just as I had promised.

A woman of her word, I expect she will do the same.

Some secrets are best kept and shared in silence, and then only with a few tears.  Because dignity is still a virtue.

Rough night I had,
I hardly sleeped.
Climbed out of bed,
But found I leaped.
Jumped in the shower,
Flew into my pants,
I tried to walk,
But only pranced.

And then recalled,
To my chagrin,
It’s still last month,
Not March I’m in!

“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.