Let's Live Again, Livonia

Rubble {Found after our show blew out}

The house is a little different now come see how the carpet's been pulled and we tred old bare drywall-splattered boards and thin Indian rugs that don't  reach, by  2 to 4 feet , any corner and they're a palest pink and lavender, the newer one blue violet and salamander, it's something you've got to see the radical change it makes I guess because we aren't going artificial any longer but embrace the pain and have comfort in our poverty by memories of  the Poor Little Match Girl, The Little Princess, The Five Little Peppers all living with floorboards such as we. It's not so ugly;;;;; much more offensive to the eye was the dirty beige carpet we could not hide and couldn't afford to have cleaned , hiding a path of finey filtered sand (Florida's version of dirt) under it's padding in a big "C" along the walkway everbody used to get to and from living and dining and only doors-to-outside room to the bathroom and bedrooms and kitchen and back to the couch and tv with your food. Now a wood floor I can sweep right if this weren't free verse I'd have to say  with a broom . But now I can say with my socks I pick up all the dust and I take it to bed. Where it goes then I've not thought about yet. I never recall it when      I am awakened by the school bus braking on the corner out my window while my good old gifted bimbo sleeps beside me on the decrepit old mattress I got before I had any kids and the oldest soon turns sweet sixteen I mean it's old and i hear you're suposed to replace them every 5 years and pillows, three,and of course you've seen all those sheets and bath towels at KMart, Target, Walmart, Penny's, Sears.....there'd be no market like that going on if these necessities lasted a dozen years.America knows people need new towels and bedsheets periodically over their lifetimes but if mom is disabled and puton SSI she can kiss new anything ever a backwards goodbye cuz it's already out of her life. After 3 years of all her income going to utilities and housing, and no way on earth to reduce these costs , and needing new just about everything,she has nothing but grief. She's learned all alone to pioneer their own relief. An $8 toaster finally afforded 2 years after theirs died gave the kids toast as snacks again , toast and jam or cinnamon sugar, growing kids starving between school's end and dinner, in a home where snacks like carrots and apples and celery and raisins and crackers and ice cream and chips did not enter. For the children that new toaster was like every day was Halloween. She got in and out of a tent perched on a trampoline with a sciatic nerve and rupttured disks and despite the ugly scene the chest-high weeds in place of grass the unrelenting heat and humid, bug-filld air to breathe and lingering smells of cat spray and spray paint from the body shop across the street who spray at night when environmentalists sleepwith a sore arm where her pacemaker-defibrillator runs through the underarm muscle and over her shoulder like a taperecorder, videocam and Secret Agent little guns like a super hero action figure with massive joints of plastic boulders she carried around their nomadic days across-array of their old ways cortizone and antibiotic cremes deoderant and streams of tp squares from restrooms she used and, from fast food joints, napkins intemperately ripped from metal holders and quickly zipped inside her purse with disposable forks and spoons, sugar, ketchup, even pepper. Toilet paper worked like crap cleaning the big round glass table she'd got from her mother --little fibers clumped up, seperated and lay everwhere.  When she tried paper towels instead they did not go with problem bowels or hemmorhoids or wiping runny noses even. leaving ragged sores  because they're styled to clean floors. Of course there's no affording both, you know, or there wouldn't be the problem. This is not Jill trying to tell her horse from Jack's so shaving all the hair off the white one. This is the lady who played the piano in the Peterkin Papers, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table here. Newspaper is what her poor Afican-American maid used when she hadn't paper towels, swearing by it even whenshe finally proudly had some. She watched how the homeless newly housed survived, putting jeans on a chair before the oven on high and broil both and door open wide so the jeans would bake dry. Handwashing her youngest a uniform blouse or jumper every night in the bathroom sink, greatful for quick-drying materials for garments. It was as intuitive for her as it was for you , Luv, to stand back and watch her young eat while dying for every bite the rest are sharing. You loved being in the bedroom the lady and little girl shared, because they were always talking or playing a game or reading to each other and it was what you lked, peace and unity, and you'd curl up amongst them happily, these people filled with love for one another and you, scolded and worse by society's watchdogs, perhaps seperated forcefully and permanently for crimes of  impropriety and child endangerment because the lady has always slept with the baby, now ten years old. Sick, they judge with no knowledge , and the mother says don't care about them--we're here together all of us and that's the only part of life that really matters. Come back to us now , Luv, for that hasn't stopped, though we scattered we're back now, this would be home, were you part.We're all waiting you know for your pace through our hearts.You set the pace, Luvvie Lady, for female humans and felines to clasp together souls losing nothing for it not common sense,intelligence, their mental balance, their no-nonsense approach to life, not losing a thing they had but gaining a  new dimension . A beautiful, powerful photograph of a rose in an ink-smelling magazine becomes a real rose with a luscious perfume. A guitar part you've heard over and over for decades comes on the radio,or in a concert you attend, with the full-band sound,drums amd cymbals, bass and sax, harmonica, pedal steel,  banjo, piano, lead and rythym guitars, flute a bit--- WE didn't have a thing but a cat who outlived all the millionaire's cats by  5 years or 6 and it would have been 50 but they got her oh Luv must you know this? I hope you return --I'm counting on it. I 've got a few stupid mistakes I must fix before you die or something. Like get that flea-infestation out. Get that carpet up and have plain floors. Let you get out--open all windows and doors. Include you in the plastic grocery bags of essentials that came with us to crash at the apartments of others, our van and at last after Grampa bought us a flash- light our beds, corners dark open windows attracting a hundred sizes of bugs and a green frog who jumped on my face in the dark, one foot sealing my mouth and one wet and gooey on my cheek with such a wide footprint I thought it had to be a snake winding round my face and I threw it at the wall and it jumped right back on me as I raised my candle, saw what it was, and removed my glasses to wipe my eyes, and was saying "It's just a frog, you guys"--and on the rim of my glasses, knocking them to the floor.Poverty gave us some silly times as we females got lodged in that bedroom door. As well as the awful ones that we don't want no more. The Puerto Rican executive who locked the doors of her  clean new minivan after eyeing me at a red light , sloshing water out of the 6-gallon paint bucket my tall sweet teen daughter and I carried together a half mile up the 100-year-old brick streets in our ragged, soaked moccasins,her eyes met mine. I was just looking at life humming, mildly curious, as I think all terminally ill who konw might be. You have been seperated from these people, you see. They are part of the world you won't see.They'll know if there was life on Mars, and who won (or stold) the Presidency. You won't. You-all no longer have in common a presumed future of greater than 20 more years--you've left their path. They can't walk yours--I thought they could empathize  pretty much but I've learned since that they simply can't. It sounds easy: imagine you've just been told by doctors you can't live over 2 more years without an organ transplant you don't qualify for. Everyone has their own fantasies of how they'd stoically take such news, not tell anyone, or handle it so beautifully they'd be a role model for millions and inspire a movie. But when it comes years after you ever clumsily, romantically , while the hormones for adventure and sex were spilling over out of control thought of your reaction to such news and were satisfied with what was surely going to be your  honorable response, or when it comes only months after on a day you aren't ready for such bullshit, man, and it doesn't go away it's all there to stay from the moment it even got half-way into your brain like knowing even though you've never thought about it that Livonia won't be coming  this way. After those days where only you and God exist and any holy people who want to take His place and save you, and somewhat sometimes and sometimes all the way, your loved ones exist in your haze especially your children and pets, to convince you you're still on their plane, you see everybody around you. The person pushing your hospital gurney laughing, clowning and running down the empty hall with you while her companion cracks up, sending him back to get a paper you're telling them fell out of your chart when they grabbed it while hopping bowlegged around the gurney, accepting the stack of papers he hands her when he puffs breathlessly back, although only one is yours, ignores your repeated insistances that 99% of those papers now in your thick file aren't about you, even when, craning your head upside down for 20 minutes, you eventually make out a man's first and last name and that he is 66. (You're 46.) THis changes nothing until the surgeon picks up your folder while adminstering valiium intraveneously to you because the nurses are reporting that you are extremely agitated , claiming your files were switched by hospital personnel. The surgeon eads two paragraphs and bellows"I can't operate on this patient! Her blood can't clot, her blood pressure is way too high,she just took more Warfarin this morning," he sizzled, disgustedly dropping the book."Why did you take an anti-clotting drug today? Didn't anyone tell you.."He said to me, all this hatred of my stupidity on his face. "I didn't," I said."I 've never taken Warfarin. I've never been prescribed it." "You prepped the wrong side," he was telling someone , his eyes rolled to the side like the usual Crucified Christ's ."We're removing nerves in the right wrist," I yelled,"No you aren't!" I was suposed to have tendon sheaths removed from my left hand, which was frightening, as I ama lifelong writer without a typewriter, andit took much reassurance for me to trust them with my left hand. Nerves seem more involved in writing than tendons -- painful scar tissue for infinity or a chronic ungodly nerve pain  or paralysis are some side effects of surgury around and on nerves. "I cannot operate this day in light of your hypertension and that you took a blood thinner today." I was getting stern lecture unwarrented so I said to man,"I didn't take any blood thinners in my life ." "Then why would your chart say you did?" "Why does it say I'm a 66-year-old man named Edward Fontana?" "This isn't your chart!" "I've been telling everybody for 20 minutes.." "Who did you tell?" This was not a bedside manner showing. "Every single person that prepped me,walked by me, brought me here,---" "And none of them told ME?" He turned to all and sundry he could get the ear of."Why didn't somebody tell me this patient had the wrong chart?" Silence. Doctor, to me:::"Point to me someone you told." I pointed to the  anesthesiologist's nurse, who was the third person in our little triangle there, everyone else busy way elsewhere. She'd been trapped reading something. WE all three knew she hadn't opened her mouth. So Doctor asked me, instead of Known Liar, "What was her response when you told her these were not your medical records?" "She said that if there was anything wrong with them, you would see that right away , you were the doctor and the only one who could read records. I said I could read them upside down from here and she said you were the only one who understood what the records meant  and so the only one who could tell if they were wrong or not." "And?" said the doctor glumly. "And?"I anded. "What happened afterwards? Anything? Did you tell anyone else what you told her and what she responded?" "She said something else," I said. "She said I couldn't possibly know if my records were wrong because I couldn't possibly understand them. She said a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. She like really scolded me see she caught me trying to see the medical records on the post behind me. " I sort of waved my strapped down arms at him.They flapped. I leaned my head all the way back off the bed to show how agonizing it quickly gets to be reading upside down. The doctor and a now-present, anxious head something lady tore rabidly through  the files. "This is you, 46-year-old pleasant Caucasian female--" "Yes, some of it's my files. Some of it's what the orderlies who raced me here picked up off the floor by thedoor of the room before mine. I think they knocked it on the floor to begin with, They made quite a breeze when they passed through." "Many of these ARE your files," the doctor was saying, preventing me from going on. He wasn't gettig it."How did you know some of these weren't your files?" He demanded and the suspicion was sudden and certain in his eyes. But of course. There I sat with my right wrist prepped for surgery, IVs in the left hand, that lead they keep in there to give you anything quickly through, all on the wrong side, setting him up for a big fall. Why didn't he read my records front to back before stepping up to the plate? If that old dude had good blood pressure and clotting would they have really operated on the wrong hand? Look how far they'd gotten towards that. As I protested strenuously and continuously that  they had the wrong records and hand they got the IV s all snuggled in the wrong hand  and never told the docotr what I said. The next people I saw was my roomate, an old lady going for the attention of the hospitalized. Doctors:"There is absolutely no reason to refer you to a cardiologist, Mrs. Rainma. This is nothing to do with cardiology. You have emphysema. As we just explained to you for 25 minutes. And have learned from your doctor you know all about it.Now, we are referring you to your doctor, to see him within 24 hours." Mrs. Rainma:I don't have no docotr1" Doctors:"Mrs...R...we just spoke to your doctor at your request, remember?" Other doctor:"No that was the cardiologist who sent her here." Mrs. R::"They won't send me to a cardiologist. That;s why I'm here.' Doc:"Who won't send you to one?" Mrs:"The insurance." Doc:"Who's the doctor we talked to?" Mrs:"I don't know. ' Docs:"Who's your pulmony doctor? Who treats your emphysema? " Lady:"My primary doctor.He won't let me see no one.." Female doctor:"Mrs. Rainman, your primary doctor is doing all thr right things, so you are getting very good treatment. Everything we showed you here tonight you are familiar with already. You are doing great." Mrs"I know how my emphysema is. I came to get my heart problem diagnosed and cured." Doc"Well then you're all cured because you have no heart problem." Mrs R:"Then why am I in a heart ward?On the heart sugury ward?" Lady:"We didn't have enough beds in regular cardiac care so you're in cardiac intensive care but there's nothing wrong with your heart and we're moving you to pulmonary if you aren't released tonight." Mrs,M:"Released tonight! I can't be released tonight! (Horrified beyond any possible reason.) Doc:"Why not?" Mrs."I haven't even had--you all ran so many tests on me you totally stressed me out. I never had a minute to call my familiy to tell them where I am. No one could possibly come for me that soon. " DOc::"I thought you reached a sister. I rememeber you refused to have the x-rays until you reached somebdy and finally you had them and somebody said you found your sister." Mrs.R:"Ha! Her answering machine, maybe! I aint had any contact with any of my people.The need to tell you before you release me too. About how my heart races too fast." (Doctors mumble, loudly reiterate the game plan and diease as emphysema, leave. Mrs. R pulls curtain all around her bed, blocking roomate's view of downtown hi-rises and quiet channel to bay of Gulf of Mexico. Thus secreted, older woman begins series of telephone calls to everyone she knows. The following is the typical content) Mrs. Rainma:"Johnny? Johnny dang it when are you gonna git home from that stressful job that awful place? This is your mommy;; I don't expect you to call me backin time before the phones here close at 9, I just wanted to let you know so you won't worry. I'm in the hospital now dont get alarmed your old Mama's gonna be alright remember your dear Daddy always said she's tough as nails and she aint going no place til she's ready. Don't forget that. Anyway its just a little spot they found on the the uh xray on the heart so I'm in the coronary care intensive care unit I don't know how long they was talkin bout sugery but I don't want none of that noise.But I'm gonna be fine in the end you'l lsee baby but if you want to come out and see me here like everybody else is doing--goodness so many came already--well, you don't have to go out to a florist and pick out a $35 arrangement or any of that nonsense --the hospital doesn't allow live flowers.If you really must, and I could sure use some cheering up and you know what cheers me up, there's a gift shop right here with just the most darling things! " And I watched the young nurse I shared with Miasma handle the fraud gracefully, listening to her obvious lies with a never tiring "Wow!" and lots of  supportive statements. Knowing I would have at least told all others near Mrs. Rainbull how she was playing this up for attention, visitors and gifts and not even telling her loved ones she was probably being released before morning, I wondered where such a young, cute, cool personality got so much class and graciousness yet still kept her cool so cool. There was no one around her to impress. She was being herself. Like she impressed God and herself and that's all she even thought of impressing, making airs and acts unnecessary and most of her holiness go unnoticed (except to God). I could die if she was there as I went out. She was cool. One of the ten people Iwas glad I lived cause otherwise I'd never known of them. Then I see her book, her PDR for nurses, and her name is on the edge of all the pages. WARE. I already know her first name--she's my nurse.As I see her last name, I cannot but see number 4 or 5on my list of 10 people I'd always cherish having found on this planet with me, a little girl of that name I taught at a preschool 22 years before.She was a first-rate five year old, just like she is a first-rate nurse. We were too close, and the headistress told me i had to distance myself from here. She had taught me everything, told me not to worry about so and so's tantrum, he'd get over it--the inside scooper, so to speak. She shone at the suggestion of being my helper and would take  my hand as I scurried across the playground to see some crying kid who'd insisted on going up the slide while a crew was coming down it, eventuating in a shoe to his eye. While I thought of my own questions (Why would you keep looking at a shoe aboutto smack your eye? Did it hyonotize you?Or did you just like expect Ian to have such control over his foot it would stop short a micromililiter from your face, and you wanted to watch it?), Miss Ware wagged her tiny finger at the offender and said "Now now you know you can't climb up the slide. If you don't use the playground equipment right you can get very hurt. THat's exactly why I didn't want you to climb up the slide wrong. Now you've gotten hurt. Can I see? Does it hurt very much?" With the concern so easily readable in perfect angelic faces and so mistakenly unnoticed in swarthy, disabled, dirty, plain, unshaven, ugly,depressed,stressed,misshapen due to broken-off teeth, hardened by  hard life faces.She'd be so sincerely bent on making their hurts better, applying the bandaids for me after carefully washing her hands in hot soapy water to her wrists. I figured her mom--who was raising her and her sister Frances alone--was a nurse. But students are yours for only one year, and then, no matter how out of proper bounds your affection or adulation of a child went, you never saw or heard of this kid again, and had no way to change that. You simply had to remember, bittersweetly. But if remember you did, and she turns out to be your sweet cool nurse during your complicated surgury 22 years down the road, you'll feel a lot better about going into that surgury. Hey--you just saw one of the Top Ten! One you were certain you'd never see again. (Of course. when you tell her after surgery who you are, she can no longer be your nurse, for she knows you. And argue it out with her--she stops you by remembering she loved you and suddenly you didn't care about her anymore  and it broke her heart and she cried and didn't want to go back for awhile. (Why do sometimes the people I love best cry over me while I'm a blind mess? I think of a letter I got from young Bob West posted elsewhere on this website written about 1979--when he thinks of me he gets so sad, he's even cried. More than you know, Deanne.He was right. I'd no idea I'd touched him at all. ) When you learn you re at the end of your movie or novel,to put it politely,

Depending on how flippant  you're being, how important you think you are to God and how  far away from the work you thought sure God's going to get out of you  you still are, you will feel many things at once--cut down a few notches, abandoned, useless, done, finito, nobody. Your plans not to let that happen, now impossible to fullfill. The total reality that you are you now is yours alone. Everyone else has "you are your future," too--they can asume they will be self-sufficient in the future, dream they have a good plan for being rich , that keeps their self-esteem up while they are struggling.Maybe they are due a nice inhertance when old. Or have lots in Roth IRAs.For whatever reasons, they can see themselves getting to buy the better quality of stuff  someday--nicer purses, pricier clothing. I have working class friends stuck where the're  at all over America  who think they are going to visit Florida someday --and usually do, 10 years or more after  first being hyped up about it. I just heard 2 different chaps who don't know each other  say they want to get boats again .I heard a 19-year-old girl still finishing high school with a 4 year-old son say she was going to get him an ATV in a year at most because "God, I couldn't wait a second longer to get one --we have Nintendo and all that, he's going to have everything.We're going to have everything." TEE HEE...... Everyone has this hope in America but the dying, the terminally ill who are already dirt poor with nothing, not even a bed for thei r youngest child, and no bedsheets , nor clothes for growing kids, the shower curtain is 20 years old ( it is a map of the earth and has a lot of countries on it that don't exist and misses many that do), the washing machine broke down, the roof leaks worse and worse each tropical rainy season but there's no way to save money to repair the roof or get a new washer.Every penny of the government check goes to utilities and housing leaving nothing monthly left for anything else,Nothing. This is not hyperbole. Medicaid requires a $2 co-pay out of patients if the docotr thinks patient can afford it. All my docotrs waived the fee but one. His office just started the fee but wanted to go back 4 months and charge m $8 to see him last month. I balked and called Medicaid, who said they could not go backwards and charge me for fees they hadn't told me about but could charge a fee from now on "but usually if the others don't charge it, none of them do. You tell this Doctor Kadosa he needs to get on the same page as the rest of your doctors, get with them and discuss your case with each other.they should all be at the same place." I told the girl at Dr.Kadosa's office that and she got huffy and said the girl before her was suposed to charge us the last 4 months but didn't tell us like she was suposed to "and that's why she got fired and I got her job.I was just a patient here...now I run this whole office." She might have thought she was bragging but if her boss wasn't cringing and barfing in the john something's seriously wrong with him. Hopefully he fired the last "lady" becasue she was rude, spteful, used her position to settle personal scores she got into with total strangers everyday. For example knowing a crippled up old shy gentle couple was stuck at the pharmacy up the street until she called Medicaid to authorize something, she kept the pharmacist's call to herself (telling the pharmacist she'd make the call right away, but the pharmacist wassuspicious, because most doctor's ofices say "uh huh, um hmm," and even repeat the number back to you after they write it down. This doctor's desk clerk said nada as the pharmacist rattled off the phone numbers and address , making it hard enough for  Margaret to believe she wrote it down that Margaret asked her point blank, "are you sure you have this right?" So the girl would read it back to her or break down and take it down. The receptionist next  went to lunch for two-and-- a --half hours without telling anyone there was an elderly disabled couple , the man on portable oxygen, with no gas to come back  from their house later,waiting at Albertson's for one of them to call Medicaid. Everytime Margaret the pharmacist called the doctor the receptionist was said to be at lunch. She didn't like the man, who stupidly thought he got preferential treatment or something because he came infor his 11 a.m. appointment at 10:50 and at 11 when the doctor opened the door, the old geezer smiled and got up and started entering his examining area. The girl behind the desk got distressed and told him to sit til he was called. He said shakily that his appointment was for now. She said he had forms toi fill out, don't get excited. but it usually took about two hours. Incredulous, the wife said,"To fill out forms? Oh dear." "No, to see the doctor," the girl said. "Oh dear, we've come a long way, and we have so much to do," the lady said fruitlessly. A  lot of people blurted out their pardon, buts--to this doctors receptionists . They didn't mean to argue, and they weren't about to turn physically nasty. They just had trouble accepting that they were on the begininng of the train ride to Auswitz. They still confusedly thought reason Mattered.It just had to sink in that this was hardball being played, here, and hang onto your hat, y'know? Many doctors' office personnel skillfully handle angry patients who made a mistake  but  this one would have none of that. "Everyone here came a long way. We have people here from Lakeland, Sebring, Clearwater, Daytona Beach and Spring Hill today. Many ride the bus and have to be back in their home town before the last bus runs. That might be Ft. Myers. Let's see--you're from --Dunedin. Close but no cigar." Where does he get these people , I thought, sinking into my chair depressedly. This one had just  told everyone there personal information about the elderly couple.The next  one  told why  the other wasn't employed there , even why she'd been fired, although one hoped it wasn't the full truth, and she was also fired for  abuse of power, unmerited condescending attitude, the Hitler in her coming out., as it did in that woman in the U.S. Army named England who posed in photos of tortured Iraqui prisoners. That same receptionist assumed becasue she told me the other was fired over not telling me there was a co-payment , I "got the message." SO as the doctor clled me, she says wait, youdidn't pay yet. You can't go in til you pay. That'll be $10. 'I don't have $10," I said."I never have $10. All my income goes to rent and utilities .".(I figured she didn't understand about property taxes.)Besides, I reiterated, Medicaid said they couldn't go backwards 4 months before they ever told me about it and make me pay back months, They said the fee would be $2 today, starting today but you need to get with all my other doctors , who don't charge me, because they can't all waive me but one.I gave them your name and number, do you wanttheirs?" "My name!" She said, hand to her lowcut black tight on her fake chest sweater. "Doctor Kadosa's name," I said , adding in my head,Stupid. "What is it?" she said." "What?" I said. "Dr. Kadosa's name," "Lee," I said. "Nope." Like I cared/ I'd seen it on the sherriff s website of people arrested. I knew it was some  Hungarian version of Lee like LeHigh or somesuch, and then finally she tells me what she's saying in cryptogram-ese:;;;; I'm suposed to be writing a $2 check to the doctor. Lee Kadosa. If I can guess hi real name, I guess, This is crazy. I write the check and she laughs and blows bubbles and takes it to the other girl  in records-desk-phones with her and says "Deanne Young wrote a check for her two dollar co-pay. Can she do that?" "Sure she can," the other hollered out so all of us could hear in the waiting room,"it's her money, she wants to pay $25 in bounced check fees to us and $30 to her bank !" This really irritates me as it was not as if I had a history of bounced checks. All my visits to him were free as are all my doctor visits and medications;; I've never been arrested , don't have a record of bouncing any check.Where did this Person get off insinuating snidely in front of an office with 20 customers in it  that if I wrote a check for even $2, it would bounce? I too felt I had stepped onto the begininng of the trip to Auswichitz. Where we are less than no one. Where does this persecutorial mind come from? Governor Jeb Bush says,"I like to see a charge to Medicaid patients, I want them to dig into their pockets and pay something so they will realize 1, the value of earning and saving and 2,  that you must and will use our resources and federal and state dollars wisely if you  have to pay for everything you get, just like the rest of us." He is certain it will save us bundles of money  and who does he care the least about? The festering stinkin poor. So he's not going to cut back his tax cuts for the rich ;;; he'll make up the revenue by teaching the state's poorest citizens to be responsible. Hey, Guv__I already was that. I ran a business 10 years, my husband worked  45 years, 52 weeks a year, He fought in Vietnam, won 3 Bronze Stars, we became terminally ill, now you want us to learn a little bit about giving our share to America. Why do you so readily pigeon-hole the poor as lifelong non-productive members of our society? Don't look at their faces as they get on the train. Don't listen as they tell you they're somebody and the world will have something  to gain!

You are in a club of you. No one else is here, thinking their life itself through the way you do. You don't sleep much. You feel such luck just to have another day when you wake up. I 'm sorry. Luv. I wasn't thinking of you, you don't wake up. Neither does Pooh. What did I do? I can't deal with it yet. I'd had those pets 15 and 20 years and could've kept both 10 years more--except for that wolf outside my door. Well Luvvie I can tell you about it. I got my computer brought back today and sothings are almost back in place almost and kind of ont. Whenever I look up from writing I think I'm somewhere else. Dan's or my bedroom or this old computer of Marina's which was always someplace else It's just these rugs and poor floorboards and the emptiness of the room itself with no knick knacks and junk and spills make me surprised to see me here I'm not at first sure where I am. Where I've been of course and when I came in.Straggling from place to place using a tent to keep our place figuring middle class familes can camp ; why can't  the least  the lowest and last? Sometimes sleeping in the van which has a bed--we did well when we had the opportunity and got a van that's good as a home to us after going through 19 states in it camping in 7 national state parks with a van with a bed and tv and vcr. It's our only tv when the electric goes off.But it's not mine-it belongs to my ex. I don't drive. he comes over for break fast or lunch or dinner or eggs.To be with his children and tease his poor pets.And give us BBC's version of current events. You forget. Where you are. After abandoning your home. You for get that there are things that you own. You've considered your bag all your things now so long. For us, 8 long weeks.It was back-breakingly hard. I found solace in emails from people , thank God for these friends to the end who won't leave. So good to see what they found a good read.Usually perfect to send other friends who don't know them and vv .

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I love Livonia

On Dan's birthday April 2 we celebrated at his assisted-living facility , which gives him a pretty nice room on the 13th floor with a view of downtown Tampa, the river, channel, and bay, and he can see north to the water tower past our house some six miles distant, because Florida is so flat. He can see if there's a squall over us or a fire at our house almost. his gives him a secure/insecure feeling at the same time.he is directly across from the Tampa tribune and Channel 10 buildings and down under his kitchen are the University of Tampa minurets designed like the Taj Majal.There's no reason to close his blinds--no one is as high up around there.Notice the stained glass panel to he right? Dan made that when he was very young; it is Bilbo Baggins. left to right Marina, just 10, Dan,57, Mary, 15.I'm behind the camera.Little did I know my whole foundation would be shooken to dust 19 days later. See Livonia on the far right being one of us like she 's been for twenty full years, and not likely to leave us soon--good health, no fleas----until Tampa Baptist Manor kicked us out, that us, on Good Friday.Fleas sucked all of her blood out by April 23.

UPDATED PHOTO OF US WHO 'S STORY THIS IS

Luvvie peeking out from behind Marina on Christmas day, 4 months before my stupidity lost her love forever

Below--Marina, 10, puts the bumper sticker on the van because her father hasn't done it in four months and she wishes he was proud. She is .