–The day of Samuel Beckett’s Funeral. December 26, 1989. Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. The Spam hat was my own humble offering.
This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.
–Dylan Thomas’s blurb on the front dustwrapper of the 1966 first American edition of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (Walker and Company)
These days the downtrodden God-Bless-You boys work the stoplight medians along Washington and Broadway in shifts. There’s a guy with a cardboard sign on every median and corner at the intersection, some days six guys holding down every possible point of access to motorists. There’s also always a gaggle of characters waiting on the sidelines, so to speak, sitting along the concrete freeway barrier and on the bus stop benches. It’s like pick-up basketball for the homeless.
You tend to see the same characters every day. I suspect they all use each other’s signs. “Stranded,” one says, and nothing else. There’s the standard, “Homeless. Please Help. God Bless.” And, “Homeless Veteran. God Bless America.”
I also saw this virtuous variant last week: “I’m Trying To Get Back On My Feet.”
“Three Children In Texas” seemed to strike an odd note, and I was uncertain whether the appropriate reaction was sympathy or scorn. I do feel sympathy, or rather compassion, for all of them, especially now that there seem to be more of them everyday. My rule of thumb is that if I encounter one of them at a red light I give him a buck, and they have always been unfailingly polite.
A couple days ago, in the rain, I saw a motorist hand one of them a pizza box through a car window, and yesterday, as I waited at the stoplight there was a guy who was holding an entirely blank piece of cardboard.
“What’s your sign say?” I asked.
“You know what it says,” he said, without the slightest hint of hostility. He was, of course, absolutely right.
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