Fabric of Us

Community is threaded by people and place. In the sultry of summer, trees line the sidewalk and dogs run in parks. Neighbors visit together at twilight with Jacaranda spilling their wilted lavender bloom onto the graveled road. Work day is over and dinner on the way. I don’t own a dog but if I felt like it, I could walk the track – the one with Eucalyptus surrounding me. Children playing on jungle gyms, sand curling their toes. Parents nearby chatting or looking at their phones. Football tossing in the grassy middle with thick bushes to the side. Fading sun calling us all home.

The park has a vibrant freeway above. A sound wall covered in green, hoping to mask the rush hour traffic. The city’s song at the end of the day. People and place full of voice in a voiceless way.

Like Martin, who sits by the bus stop in one-hundred-degree weather, covered in layers of clothes. He has a committee in his head, voices that require animation of movement as he paces back and forth. Sometimes he walks in the middle of the street, cars barely stopping in time to not hit him. His filthy clothes, whether they started out black or became that way through the frays of dirt and leaves, I wouldn’t know. But his presence is part of the fabric of us. As familiar as the trees and the flowers of well-maintained homes.

In the hospital where I worked, he came to our behavioral health unit. He laid for a month in the bed, not leaving the room and barely talking. The stench of his clothes was removed by Tide but he refused the offer of new ones. He ate three meals a day in his room. He spoke with grunts until it was time for discharge. We agreed on the address to send him home. Hospitals have to know a place, not wanting to “dump” someone to the streets without appropriate follow up care, as defined by a collection of suits and collars. But he rebuffed other offers.

His address was our Starbucks. Mine and his. Where I pay $5 for a coffee and he begs for peoples’ leftover food. I believe he lives in the trees that line the freeway sound wall, although I have no proof. He sits at the gas station sometimes, where people smile timidly, afraid to approach his distant eyes. Martin has an air of aggression, like an alley cat who could pounce at any point. He is in his own thoughts with no room for others. The gas station attendant gives him sandwiches and Martin eats on the chair. Dirty fingernails grasp the bread. He says thank you once in a while.

I met another patient in our hospital’s ICU. Unhoused, I gave him shelter options. He looked at a picture of a Sycamore on the wall. He pointed a bony finger and waved it around the room. “Why would I want to live in a box like this when my home is with the trees? I wake up to sky and birds. I am part of nature. I am free.”

In my mind’s eye, I think Martin believes this too. He lives in the patchwork of quilted streets, part of our rhythm, known to us like a background of squirrels. His back might rest on dirt under the canopy of trees. His world is mostly hidden from mine. Allowing glimpses only in day.

I haven’t seen him in months and I wonder if he is okay. I’ve known him at least twenty-five years although we have barely spoken. Is it possible to know a person one-way? It is a certainty that he doesn’t know me, a cast of colors and sound rushing past the bus stop where he spends the day. He is a still point to the orbit of others. Where does our circle begin, where do boundaries divide? We live in the same grid but with different minds.

It is a strange thought that he probably also doesn’t know that he matters. That he won’t be forgotten. That we ask about him, care about him, wish for his peace. I worry that he has passed beyond because I am pretty certain he wouldn’t move away from our habitat. With rushing traffic, changing seasons, blankets hidden under a freeway, eventually perhaps, we will all become the roots of trees.