Reality Check

So for a year now I’ve been stressing about a Situation.

Three times a week, we drive the same route to preschool. The Punkernoodles’ school is great, but it’s a little far – a 20-minute drive. The route takes us through several neighborhoods and requires us to cross Aurora Avenue. Also known as Highway 99, this mini highway through Seattle is, well, pretty much a shit hole. For miles it basically consists of flea-ridden motels offering hourly rates, strip clubs, gun clubs, fast food “restaurants,” even drive-through coffee huts where your barista will dress up in cheap lingerie. The underbelly of our town, if you will.

Anyway. Before crossing this treasure of a byway, we have to stop at a long red light. At the corner stands a homeless man. A very bedraggled homeless man. He’s an older guy, no doubt looking even more aged than he actually is, with a nest of wildish hair, a gnarled grimace, pale watery eyes, and a sign. The sign has changed a few times since we first started passing him, but generally it is fashioned from a wrinkled piece of box cardboard and is scrawled with a request for food, money etc. For much of the past year (though not in the past couple months), he wore a snowsuit, a kind of torn-up puffy sleeping-bag-looking thing. In this suit, or whatever outfit of the day he can muster, he shuffles along the sidewalk, grumbling and peering into car windows with his sign.

It is sad – I know that. I have a lot of compassion for people like this man. I have interviewed many of them as a journalist, written stories about programs that support homelessness. I have done the midnight homeless count and spent the night in a homeless shelter to interview the men who called it home. It’s not simple – lots of factors contribute to a life like this: Bad luck, sure, and also addiction, mental illness, poor social suport systems. Bottom line, people like him suffer on levels I personally cannot really even imagine.

But that’s not what I’ve been thinking about this past year. This whole time, I have been worried about the minutes we spend every commute sitting, in the right-hand-lane, right at his corner as we wait for the light to turn green. For the first six months or so, when the kiddos were a bit younger, I was just concerned they would notice this scruffy specter and have nightmares. Then, as Punkernoodle 1 inched closer to her fourth birthday, I began to panic about the day she would inevitably ask, “Mommy, what is that man doing?”

I know, it’s weak. I admit it. But I was afraid of having to explain homelessness, in stark terms, with such a compelling visual standing right before us. In the 2 minutes of a red-green light cycle.

Finally, a few months ago, the question came. I played the classic (and weak, I know, I know) brush off. “Oh, I don’t know, honey – sometimes people just stand outside with signs.”

Yes, I am a pathetic chicken-shit of a parent.

Another time, as 2 1/2-year-old Sister listened in, Punkernoodle 1 tried to come in from another angle. “What does that sign say, Mommy?” In that probing, demanding, painfully innocent 4-year-old way.

“Not sure, babe,” I chirped out as the light changed and I slammed the gas pedal. “I missed it.”

Other times I just distracted them at the corner so they wouldn’t notice. “Let’s sing a song,” I’d say. “What’s your favorite dessert?”

It’s not that I am afraid of tough topics. I take them on all the time. I’m like a parrot about the whole “your body is private” thing. We’ve done food drives and toy drives and  have talked about how some children don’t have money for good food or nice toys and it’s good to help them. Heck, my daughters have a cousin being raised by two dads – and they already know all about that.

There’s just something about the harsh reality of a person so run-down, so obviously alone and desperate and unloved, so without-a-home, that I can’t bear to break to them. Maybe that’s because I don’t really understand it, or believe it, myself at some base level: How can someone in our country, our community, have no home? Nowhere to sleep? Or shower, or eat? It’s shameful – not on the people without a bed, but, maybe, on all of us with one. On me.

Well. Finally, this week, the fateful moment arrived. The day I’ve been avoiding like a coward for a year. We pull up to Aurora. It’s an uncharacteristically sunny fall Seattle day. The girls are very busy looking out their windows. There he is. Here it comes. “Mommy? What is that man doing?”

I can’t avoid it this time. Too direct. Too obvious. She’s gotten too smart, too perceptive. This is going to shatter her innocence forever, steal her open-hearted wonder at the world and give her the first spoonful of human bitterness, but there’s nothing more I can do about it. Fuck. Ok – here it goes: “Well, sweetie. Sometimes people don’t have any food or money. So they might make a sign asking other people for money, or food, so maybe if they hold the sign up people will help them.”

I wait for it. The request to roll down the window and pass this man some money. And some food. And maybe invite him home to sleep in our guest room, at least until Nana comes to visit.

“Mommy,” she barks in her recent, loud, newly assertive and slightly demanding way. I cringe.

“He should just get a job.”

Oh my god. All this time, all this fear – of the wrong thing. She’s not losing her rosy outlook on the world. She’s training for public office. Ha.

Ok. Sigh of relief. Laughs all around. Note to Self: Make a few extra donations to the food bank, kids in tow. Volunteer at a shelter. Find children’s book explaining mental illness?

Find a new route to school.

Just kidding…

The Food Project – Getting Started

It’s been a while since we’ve posted, mostly because it feels as though we’ve been eaten alive by our garden (isn’t it supposed to be the other way around???). But really, things here at the Punkernoodle Palace have revolved around the seemingly endless task list associated with getting stuff ready for summer.

We’ve grown an edible garden every year for the past 6 or 7 years, with varying degrees of success. It’s actually a lot of fun, and we never know exactly how it’s going to go – which vegetables and herbs will take root and succeed to harvest, and which (depending on weather, our skills and maybe a little luck, or lack thereof) will flop. One year, when we lived in a small house on Capitol Hill, we were surprised to receive a wildly bountiful potato crop that lasted us well into fall/winter after we threw in a couple dozen sprouting potatoes into a strip of little-used earth along our backyard fence. We usually have a great pea harvest and good luck with zucchinis (who doesn’t?). Tomatoes have been trickier – we lost more than a hundred unripened ones to an early rainy season one year (this year we’ll try covering them if the threat should arise again) but have also enjoyed hundreds of juicy, sweet cherry tomatoes from our potted plants.

There is nothing better than the taste of food from your own earth, freshly picked. Even our two little Punkernoodles love eating tomatoes, spinach – even onions! – straight from the plant, even though they often turn their nose at less-fresh, store-bought versions on their dinner plates.

This year, our garden has spread from its modest backyard plot into some nicely landscaped plots, bordered by antique brick, in the front. We’ve added chickens and are enjoying watching them grow from the tiny pullets and chicks they were a couple months ago into big girls who might start gracing us with urban eggs before winter if we’re lucky.

After recently (and obsessively) reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I now have even bigger hopes for our little home food crops. If you’ve read the book, you know what I mean when I say it can change your outlook on the cutural and environmental implications of our food choices. If you haven’t read the book, you should. Anyway, a few chapters in it dawned on me – there’s no reason we can’t do this. Ok, maybe not to the extent Kingsolver and her family does (we don’t have acres of rural land to grow a year’s worth of our own vegetables and meat, for one thing). But we have some space, which we fill with as many cabbages, carrots, pea vines and spinach seeds as we can, plus a handful of chickens who will hopefully give us fresh organic eggs soon. And, most importantly, we have what I hope will be the key to the success of this new Punkernoodle family plan: the Ballard Farmers Market.

Seattle in general has amazing farmers markets. We are lucky to live in a neighborhood that hosts a year-round Sunday market. Farmers from our county and beyond truck in whatever is fresh and in season every week. Most of it is organic, and these farms use free-range, grass-finished and sustainable methods to grow hormone- and chemical-free vegetables and meat, practically in our own backyard. Ok, not that close, but thousands of miles from the South American bananas we’ve become programmed to think we need to eat every week of the year.

I go to the market often, but I always use it to supplement our weekly grocery visits – I spend maybe $30 on a handful of market produce. If I really looked at every stand with a fresh eye, treating the market as my grocery, how much of our weekly food could I get there? Could I, complementing with whatever we grow in our yard, fill nearly all our nutritional needs from these local farmers and food artisans?

Like Kingsolver, my husband and I discussed some necessary exceptions to a potential buying-local rule: coffee, tea and spices, chocolate (though we’d aim, as we do anyway, to buy those through fair-trade sources). What about staples like bread and pasta, beans and grains, we wondered? I did some research. I was surprised to find a couple of Washington sources for some of those, including a Methow Valley enterprise called Bluebird that grows and processes emmer/farro, rye and oat flour. And I was excited to learn on Sunday (more about the first project trip to the market later) that I can get beans of many varieties grown in the Yakima Valley only 150 miles from us, not bad on the local-eating chart.

For now, we decided we will buy bread from local bakers using organic ingredients and conscious practices, as well as acknowledged that we’ll need to occasionally buy some things of the truly non-local/commercialized variety (hey – we have a 2- and 4-year-old who might not be so down with this plan of ours, at least right away). Even then, I was excited to see that our local natural-foods co-op has great orange tags in every food section denoting which products are produced locally – so we can try to navigate to the mac and cheese that is still from down the road, or highway, vs. across the country, cutting down on our global footprint and supporting our local community. The overarching goal is simple: to change our habits so that we can begin eating and appreciating local food that is in season. What to do when there is (practically) no food in season?? We asked ourselves that, too, as Kingsolver does in the book. What I learned, or was reminded of, by reading it is that there are always foods in season, even during the soggy, nearly freezing Pacific Northwest winters. I am newly interested in the other methods of relying on local foods that I learned about in the book – canning, drying, freezing foods when they’re in season. I’ll report the (probably hilarious) attempts at those when the time comes.

Obviously, we decided to go for it. I would take my $200+ normally spent at the store to the market this weekend with a fresh eye and a new task: feed us all for a week. I spent that money, and I’ll report what it bought us (and what I’m doing with it) in the next blog installment.