Writing
SHELTER
the architecture of our days
Clayton’s Neighborhood
Prologue
On a Saturday back in 2003, I pushed my children, ages two and four, in a double stroller down Broadway Avenue in Seattle. Up ahead I saw a man in a doorway. He lay in a sleeping bag, facing away from the street. How did you end up here? I wondered. Where is your family? Will you survive the winter rain? I tried to imagine having a paper cup half full of change and that being all that I owned. How long would I make it out here? I thought of my children living on the street and picked up the pace, hoping they didn’t notice this man curled up on a piece of cardboard. But the kids, who saw everything, saw him and asked. Now, I had to explain how there were people in this world who had no home to return to and that we were going to respond to this reality by pushing past it. I felt ashamed to be an adult. I was supposed to be a role model for my children. I was supposed to teach them Please and Thank You and Treat Others with Respect and Kindness and yet here I was passing the doorway as if this person did not exist. That was the beginning of their education, their first lesson in how to treat people living on the street. I feel badly and then quickly move along. I say it’s a terrible thing and then head into the store to buy dinner.
For years, after that Broadway morning, I noticed people living on the street just long enough to step around them. It was as though getting too close would make their lives rub off on me. But then I met Clayton.
Clayton (1)
Dogs barked and darted back and forth. Adults held leashes and talked
in clusters.
“You can do this,” a woman yelled. Seven pairs of arms bent and straightened in a row of pushups. Heavy breathing.
A jet sounded overhead. I looked up at the April sky. Low hanging clouds stretched to the horizon.
“Hello sir,” a cheerful voice called out.
I noticed and ignored all of this. I focused on the watch ticking at my wrist. My daughter was late for high school. We had walked two blocks from our house and now followed a loose line of commuters cutting through the playfield, some held coffee, others briefcases.
Three runners circled the field. Beyond them, a handful of resting bodies scattered against the fence line. Some were covered in blankets, others with pieces of cardboard.
“Hello sir.” Again, the cheerful voice. It had a deep, slightly gravely sound of someone who smoked.
I looked up to see a man wearing a ball cap sitting on the bench in the corner of the field, backpack and sleeping bag by his side. An overgrown gray beard and dark mustache covered his face but could not hide a growing smile. His frayed coat and pants hung loose over his body, covering a slight frame and narrow shoulders. When he stood up, he looked to be just over five feet. His body type was the same as mine except I was a foot taller.
“Hello sir,” he waved at me.
I gave a nod and kept moving.
At the end of the day, I met my daughter at school and we followed the reverse route across the playfield. Again, there was the bearded man and, again, he said, “Hello sir.”
This greeting happened the next day and the next. He said “hello” as if we were old friends, as if to say, “What luck to keep running into you!” I responded with a blank stare. At the time, I didn't think much of it; I wish I had. Looking back, if someone sitting on the playfield, eating ice cream with friends, ran up to me and said “hello” or one of the soccer players waved at me three days in a row, how could I ignore them? I
look for reasons to connect with people in the neighborhood: “Nice hat.” “Love the color of your coat.” “Wow, look at those shoes!” Anything to disrupt this feeling of moving through strangers. If the man with the beard had been someone in the park who did not appear to be homeless, I would have returned the greeting. Today, I picture my cold response to his kindness and the image fills me with regret.
“He’s only talking to you,” my daughter said one morning on the way to school.
“What?” I said.
“He’s not saying hello to the others.” She pointed to the people crossing the field behind and ahead of us.
That’s when I woke up and started to notice the man with the beard.
❖
When my wife and I first moved to the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle, back before we were married, the playfield was an expanse of dirt. Sometime after that the city rolled out grass sod. Still later, the grass was replaced with artificial turf. Two baseball diamonds anchored opposite corners of the field. In between them, yellow lines defined a soccer pitch. Along the western side of the playfield were three tennis courts, each surrounded by chain linked fence. Two of the courts had since been converted to a basketball court and a space for skateboarders to work their tricks.
If you stood at the center of the field and slowly turned around, you could see the playground, to the north, where I spent hours pushing our young children on the swing set. Beyond the swings, in the open lawn next to the water feature, we held birthday parties filled with sack races, craft projects and cake. Here, at the center of the field, my son, sitting in a stroller, attended his first protest rally against the World Trade Organization and my daughter played middle school soccer games. Over by the sidelines to the east, I taught my son how to ride a bike. Saturday nights, my wife and I passed through this space to go out to dinner. In the heat of July, our family bought ice cream cones across the street to the south and sat here to eat them.
When my son put on his first suit for the prom, he asked me to take a picture.
“Where?” I asked.
“The park,” he said.
Officially, these three blocks were divided between Cal Anderson Park and Bobby Morris Field, but, to us, it was all simply the park.
❖
My daughter and I played a game called Bodyguard. Every two weeks, she carried her earnings from working at a restaurant to the bank. It was my job to protect her on the way even though she was stronger and faster than me. Normally, she felt comfortable walking this route on her own but depositing hundreds of dollars in cash from tips made her uneasy. We stood back-to-back at the automatic teller. She inserted the money; I faced the street to make sure all was well.
It was in early July, during one of those deposits, that I saw the man with the beard. He stood at the corner next to the grocery entrance and waved at me. He wore dirty
pants and a stained shirt. He looked like he hadn’t bathed in days. Homeless people are not supposed to be this happy, I thought, and yet, there he was smiling and waving. I waved back.
He approached me and said, “Hello.”
“Hi there, I’m Stokley,” I said and shook his hand.
“I’m Clayton. What’s going on?”
“It’s my birthday.”
“Well, happy fucking birthday,” he yelled. “How old are you?”
“57.”
“I’m fifty,” he said. He told me that he had a wife and a daughter but didn’t know where they were.
I didn’t know what to say; I was trying to imagine not knowing my daughter’s whereabouts.
Walking home across the playfield, my daughter said, “I was making my deposit and saw a creepy man come near. I was nervous until I saw it was your friend.”
Friend? I wondered. He was friendly.
Growing up, my father said, “You need to help the people in your path.” On the way to his office, he gave his spare change to the man sitting on the corner. “I hope that someday someone will do the same for me,” he said.
That evening I wrote in my notebook, “July 5, 2019: He lives in the park a couple of blocks away. I live in a big house that will grow even bigger in September when the kids move out. This is what a broken world looks like.”
A week later, I saw Clayton sleeping in the park. He lay on the ground with his head resting on his pack. Next to him, four people sat in a circle, talking and eating their ice cream. He looks vulnerable, I thought, so exposed. I saw people sleep here every day and just walked past them, but this was different. I knew his name.
❖
As a kid, I would take a right out of our driveway and bicycle down the sidewalk along High Street to the center of Dedham, a town not far from Boston. I would park my bike and go in search of comic books at the newsstand. Some days, I would continue left on Washington, through the rotary, and past the old garbage incinerator to the mall. Other days, I would turn right on Washington and go to the record store in the Plaza. On fall and spring mornings, I bicycled to school with my friends. On Sundays, my family rode down Chestnut Street past the town jail to church. I spent a childhood pedaling the
streets of Dedham and not once did I see anyone sleeping on the side of the road or sitting on a sidewalk with a cardboard sign in their lap.
Everyone I knew slept with a roof over their heads in bedrooms with windows that overlooked cars parked in driveways. There must have been people in my town who went to sleep hungry; I just didn’t know them.
❖
After escorting my daughter to school, I returned back up the hill, through the playfield, and home. An hour later, I crossed the field again to attend a yoga class. In the afternoon, my daughter and I met at the grocery store before going to our favorite coffee place. Add a trip to the bookstore and I crossed that field as many as eight times in a day.
One of the benefits of this predictable behavior was seeing the others who followed regular patterns—the man who smoked a cigarette and read his book outside the funeral home each morning and the woman who ran laps around the park at lunchtime,
clutching a purse under her arm.
If Clayton had said, “Hello” when I was running an errand in a different part of the city, I doubt I would have seen him again. Thankfully, we encountered each other in the park, at the center of my routine. What I didn’t know then was that he was also deep into his routine. So, his gesture to connect with, “Hello Sir” was supported by the architecture of our days. Looking back, it wasn’t a question of: Would we meet again? No, it was more like, how could we possibly avoid one another?
A second element that encouraged me to interact with Clayton was the fact that my youngest child was prepared to go off to college. After the kids were born, my wife and I built a system to raise and protect. Over time we fine-tuned our operation to keep two lives safe. For 20 years this parenting machine rumbled along until now. In a matter of weeks, our day-to-day parenting responsibilities would come to an end. I was a parenting pro with no one to watch over.
In the winter, on the occasional Friday, my wife and I would walk through the cold rain, past Clayton’s bench, and into my favorite restaurant. We would hang up dripping coats just inside the entrance and follow the host across the room. We would sit on a bench that reminded me of an old church pew and order drinks. I would look at the other diners and listen to the kitchen clatter behind us. Steam, generated by the warm bodies, pressed against the glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was as if the world outside did not exist.
In the summer, lunch tables spilled out onto the sidewalk. What was a private dining experience behind closed doors moved into the public. Here cutlery, cloth napkins, and specialty drinks rubbed up against life on the street. What separated the two were a few three-foot-tall posts connected by a thin line of rope.On one side of the rope, cigarette butts, leaves, and a broken windshield pressed into the gutter. A man yelled. Cars honked. Feet crushed a half-filled coffee cup, the stain expanding across the sidewalk. On the other side of the rope, the host would show us to a table. The waiter would take our order. We would say“please.” They would say“thank you.”On the last Friday in July, a few weeks after Clayton and I had exchanged words at the ATM, my wife and I sat at my favorite outdoor table. It had a bench big enough for two that faced down the sidewalk so that we could see pedestrians as they approached.Our lunch arrived. For her, a salad. For me, a BLT. I was about to take a bite when I saw Clayton heading towards us. He saw me, smiled ,and stopped at our table. I introduced him to my wife.“I just finished sweeping at the cafe,”he said. The cafe was located just around the corner.
“You work there?” I asked.
“Now and then,” he said.“I’m heading to the park.”
The backs of his hands were marked with dirt. In my hand was half a sandwich.
I had seen this dance play out many times before, the destitute and the diners. A hand reaches out. Laughter and conversation stop. Diners struggle to ignore the outstretched hand. Awkward glances are exchanged. Diners waiting for the moment to pass.
It was a pleasure to finally introduce Clayton to my wife, but I felt uncomfortable sitting there with our food as he stood. Had he eaten? I wondered. I didn’t offer; he didn’t ask.
The destitute approaches the diner because they want something. The diner then decides to dig into their pockets or look way. Clayton broke this pattern. He neither eyed our food nor talked about his troubles. In fact, he seemed to enjoy meeting my wife as much as I enjoyed introducing her. This was part of what drew me to him, how he disrupted my assumptions of how we were supposed to interact.
Garage Time
On a Sunday morning, I looked at the kitchen clock. It was 11:05. “Time to go to tutoring,” I said to my daughter Lava who was in the tenth grade.
“Just a second,” she said, and disappeared up the stairs to her room.
I stood by the back door.
She returned with her shoes in hand.
“Let’s go,” I said and walked out the door to the car, as if leaving the house would make her move faster.
She appeared at the back door with her backpack and computer, said, “I forgot something,” and ran back inside. I looked at my watch, 11:09.
We climbed into the car, drove down the highway, and off the exit ramp. The dashboard said, 11:20.
I drove into a parking garage, pulled into the first stall, and turned off the engine. The clock read 11:23. “We made it,” I said and leaned back in the seat, pleased that we were seven minutes early.
Lava pointed to the clock and glared at me. “So what was the rush?” she said.
❖
My father was never late. He always arrived on time which meant that he arrived early, which meant, later, when I was old enough to meet him on my own, I arrived early.
When I was younger, I chafed at his insistence on the clock. Now, 61 years into life, I no longer think of being on time as good or bad; it’s simply the way I live.
Arriving early is now so familiar, that once when I was five minutes late to meet my friend, she worried that something had gone terribly wrong.
❖
In the garage, Lava and I parked in front of a bank which was closed, it being Sunday. A drive-thru automated teller stood directly behind us. I stared out the windshield as Lava stared at me.
To arrive at this moment, I started moving at 8 am when I went for a run around the neighborhood that ended at the bakery where I picked up pastries. At home I slid them into the oven, took a shower, and made scrambled eggs. My wife Sarah cut fruit and called Schuyler, our son, and Lava to the table. The four of us sat down. With the changing work, school and sports schedules, this hour was one of two in the week that we ate together.
❖
A few years earlier, when Schuyler was 11 or 12, he was invited to go skiing for the day. His friend’s family said they would pick him up at 7am. I set my alarm for six and made Schuyler breakfast. He gathered his skis as I assembled a sack lunch. We sat in the living room to wait for his ride. 7 o’clock. 7:05. 7:10. 7:15?!
Frustrated, I said, “They’re late.”
“Oh yeah, they’re always late,” Schuyler said.
“How late?” I asked.
“They probably won’t be here until 7:30.”
“So, why did we get up so early?”
“So, we’d be on time. Our family is always on time.”
❖
Every Sunday followed the same pattern. After family breakfast, I rushed Lava out the door. We pulled into the parking garage and she pointed at the clock.
Until one Sunday, Lava asked her usual question, “Why are we so early?” and without thinking, I said, “So we get this.”
“What?” she said.
“This,” I pointed to the space between us.
“What is this?”
I thought for a moment and said, “Garage time.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what this was but at least now it had a name.
❖
On a winter afternoon, at the end of Lava’s school day, we walked to the grocery store. I picked up milk, yogurt and a loaf of bread. She found a pack of gum. Together we looked to see if our favorite foods were on sale. When we approached the checkout, there were two lines of customers. I chose the line to the right; it was shorter.
The customer in front of us leaned against the counter and watched the clerk bag his groceries. The clerk moved the bags from the counter to the grocery cart and announced how much money was owed. The customer reached into his pockets looking for his wallet.
I thought, Why didn’t he have his credit card ready instead of doing this last minute search?
“Let’s go,” I whispered.
“What?” Lava said.
“This line is taking forever,” I said.
“But dad,” she said, “this is garage time.”
I had just rushed from work to meet Lava at the end of her school day. Soon we would walk home to start her homework and my dinner prep. After eating, there would be more homework, dishes to clean, and teeth to brush before going to bed.
This standing in line was a small break before the momentum of the day took over again. I turned away from the register and faced Lava. I felt my body settle and my shoulders relax.
❖
The beauty of garage time was how it created this small space within an overly scheduled life. It was a space that made no demands. It had no requirements. For a handful of minutes, we could speak or stand in silence.
After that day in the grocery store, we found garage time at the doctor’s office, sitting in the waiting room; standing outside the grocery before its doors opened to the public; and at the airport, milling around the gate before boarding the plane.
❖
There’s a luxury hotel that sits along the beach in Santa Monica. To walk into the lobby is to feel a space that is at once grand and intimate. The high ceilings create an indoor courtyard. Plush chairs and couches in the center of the room form semi-private spaces in which to gather. Two bars and eating areas sit to the south and west. A gift shop to the north. Lava and I don’t stay here. We stay in the smaller hotel across the street. Our room looks out on a lawn made of artificial turf.
Lava attended her first year of college at a university not far away from the hotel. She wanted to take a break from the campus, so we met here for the weekend. During the day, we walked the beach and sat inside coffee shops and on benches facing the water. In the evening, we left our room and crossed the street to the luxury hotel. The doormen greeted us as if we were old friends. They greeted everyone that way.
Up the curved stairway, we passed the reception desk into the main room. We circled around people gathered in small clusters and large groups and found a spot to the side, two long couches joined in a V-shape. There seemed to be a convention going on. I watched a group sitting together cheer, “Hello” to half a dozen people who walked into the room. A trio—piano, bass and drums—played soft jazz standards and the room filled with conversation.
Lava and I sat side by side. We commented on the hotel guests as they came together and apart, remembered little moments from life at home, and rested in silence. It was three days of nowhere to go. Nowhere to be. Nothing to do. Listening to the jazz, I wondered, Were those Sundays in the parking garage a training ground?
My son and daughter began the process of leaving home. Our family no longer shared daily and weekly routines under one roof. We left the rituals of their childhood behind and moved into a future where the kids would build their own lives. More and more, Sarah and I would have to fit into their schedules.
❖
This past spring, Lava was a junior in college. She called one afternoon as she walked to work. Her shift started at 4 o’clock. She told me about her 14-mile run that morning and plans to go out later in the evening. I said that I had been outside reading the newspaper and gave a report about our pet bunnies that lived on the deck. We spoke for a few minutes until she said, “I just arrived at work. Thanks for garage time.”
I looked at my watch.
She was ten minutes early for her shift.
❖
My father died 10 years ago. I never thought that he would be gone this long. I never imagined 10 years of not seeing him or hearing his voice or simply sitting together.
On December 12, each year, I make a chocolate cake with white icing to celebrate his birthday. My father’s mother, who died more than 20 years ago, taught me the recipe. While mixing and baking, I talk to Dad and Grandma. It is a one-sided conversation that takes place mostly in my head, but I try to imagine what they would say.
The cake process begins the night before, when I take two sticks of butter out of the refrigerator to soften. In the morning, I mash the butter with sugar, eggs, and melted chocolate. I sift 2-1/2 cups of flour. The recipe calls for two and three quarters cups, but grandma said, “Use less flour. You can always add, but you can never take away.”
I spoon in sour cream and vanilla and measure 2 teaspoons of baking soda into a cup of boiling water. I mix it all together and pour the batter into two square pans. Towards the end of the baking process, I check the cakes every two minutes and pierce them with a dry straw from a broom. If the straw comes out wet, the cake goes back in the oven. After covering the cake with the icing, I cut a piece, put it on a plate, and place the plate at the center of the island that stands in the middle of our kitchen. There Dad’s piece of cake will stay for a week.
The writer, Annie Dillard said, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.”
My father continues to shape the hours of my day. His drive to be on time flows through me and now my children. What I didn’t anticipate, and never would have imagined, is how his never-be-late rule created Garage Time, those brief moments in the day, moments where I can simply sit with my child and remember, I am here with you and isn’t that enough?
Kepler and Snowflakes
I read somewhere that in a single year the astronomer, Johannes Kepler experienced a great tragedy while also writing a book about snowflakes.
It was the winter of 1611. Kepler walked the streets of Linz. He had no place to go and too much on his mind. His wife and daughter had just died. War ran through his homeland, sending him to this exile. His eyes were so full of images of grief that he couldn’t see beyond his face. That’s how he noticed the flake, that one snowflake out of the tens of thousands that fell around him. Close up against his pupil he saw clean lines and a grace of construction.
“Six points of perfect symmetry,” he said as the flake hit his cheek and forever melted. “Why six and not four or seven?”
Johannes looked out at the parallel lines of snow that passed before him. “Six is half of the apostles. It’s three times two. A year ago, there were three of us then I lost two. God must have a plan.”
Johannes dropped to his knees. His hands turned red as he pushed through the cold powder, searching for a clue.
But underneath this pile of equally sided stars he found only pebbles and dirt.
Kosovo
They dropped bombs on Kosovo last night. I should care but I don't. I should be full of sadness and rage--I'm not. News travels more slowly now.
I wipe breadcrumbs off the kitchen counter and sweep the floor. The sink and dish rack trade ceramic back and forth. I scrub plastic baby bottles with an oversized pipe cleaner. My attention is drawn to the inside of a rubber nipple and making sure the tip is clean.
This is my world.
Here is where I find the local news. From the living room to the front door, that I call regional. Noteworthy but not necessary. The ring of the doorbell and the dull thud of letters hitting our mailbox, these are national headlines. International events take place between the front gate and the park. Kosovo is so much further away than the park and the park is as far as we go.
Six months ago, Kosovo was a name on a map that, with difficulty, I could locate. Today I can't even find the map.
I try to read the newspaper, but the words won't stick.
My son ate carrots this morning. That brings us to four. Milk, rice, yams, and now carrots. He tries one new food a week, one thought for the tongue, that is enough. Kosovo has to wait for acorn squash, peas, barley, corn, beats, spinach, tomato, pumpkin and lima beans. Kosovo must stand in line behind eggs, bread and butter.
It will be years before my son imagines our home as part of a map, surrounded by a landscape that makes up a country. By then what will become of those people whose homes are bombed into the earth?
A birthday held underground, that much I remember from the papers. A little boy celebrates another year in a dark room of cement.
I want to go out but the teacups multiply. Plates spread themselves thin across the counter. Laundry piles at the basement door. My eyes lose their ability to focus.
I used to get out my binoculars and train them on the buildings downtown. I used to care about the people in my city. Now it's a question of pacing out the toys to last until the afternoon nap. Now it's a question of dry, wet, hunger, sleep, four intersecting plains on a small map. A map that has no capitols or city borders. A map where election results will never be posted.
As my son begins to grow and take in the world, I see less. Soon even the movements of our neighbors, walking just outside the window, will become a distant landscape. And their names, Mark and Nicole, will sound as foreign as Kosovo.