Sunday morning. I'm looking out our bedroom window on the 11th floor of the Hope Lodge. Our view overlooks West 31st Street, a major thoroughfare linking Penn Station and Madison Square Garden to Avenue of the Americas. It is drizzling out and there are not as many people walking the beat. Across the street I can see two bodies from the waist down lying on the sidewalk. One is a woman in a skirt with tattoos on her legs and the other is a man. They are lying on a blanket. I wonder if they are some of the people I was watching last night. You see around 11:30 pm I was lying in bed and could hear yelling from down below. I got out of bed and sat on the window ledge with my binoculars watching a group of 6 or 7 people who had set up camp across the street. There was one woman and the rest were men. When I say set up camp what I mean is there is a group of homeless people who have their cardboard, milk crates and in this case a couple of folding camp chairs. They have their belongings in backpacks or plastic bags and they congregate near the curb but take up space on the sidewalk. I watched them for awhile as they passed cigarettes back and forth. One man took his shoes off, another his shirt. Several of the men appeared very fidgety walking back and forth down the sidewalk. One appeared to be drinking a canned beer. I watched them for half an hour and decided to go to sleep.This morning several of them were still there. The camp is still there. The two people sleeping are a block down from the camp. I will never get used to seeing this.
There are a lot of new people on the floor. Larry and Val and Jim and I are the seniors here. One of the newbies is Gail. She recently had a stem cell transplant using her own cells. I was talking to her daughter, Karen, in the kitchen the other day and she told me her mom had a rare form of T-cell lymphoma. I about fell over when she told me it was Angio-Immunoblastic T-cell Lymphoma, the exact same type of cancer Jim was diagnosed with. Gail is in her late 70's and very frail. She writes poetry and has three books published. She is a self proclaimed hypochondriac, married to a retired ENT who according to Gail has very little patience with her condition. Maybe he is having a difficult time accepting her diagnosis. The people we meet and the stories they tell are very interesting. Her daughter, Karen, who is 46 years old was actually born at Fairfax Hospital and she went to George Washington University for college. Gail bends our ear every time we see her in the kitchen. She does not know Jim has the same diagnosis. I feel it would not be good for her to know that he relapsed soon after his transplant using his own cells.
The rain stopped and I encouraged Jim to take a walk with me. The streets were less crowded so we thought it would be ok. WRONG...we were only on our second block of our walk before seeing a man urinating against the tire of a parked car right out in the open as people walked by. I got a sick nauseous feeling in the bottom of my stomach. On our way back to the lodge we intentionally walked past the homeless group across the street. Jim is convinced they are involved with the selling of the synthetic marijuana called spice/K2. They are at least selling something illegal. Suspicious people walk by and exchange money for hand rolled cigarette looking things. Whatever it is looks shady. This is a closer up glimpse of some of the people I have been watching from our window.
Sitting on the deck in the dark with an Elmer T. Lee bourbon in hand. Cicadas and crickets competing for attention. The sounds of the Shenandoah River rapids at the bottom of our property. Lightening and thunder rumbling over the mountain, dogs barking in the distance, faint sounds of jets in the night sky, the wind rustling through the tall pine trees. Bright stars forming in the night under the light of the first quarter moon. We hope to be awake long enough to watch the Perseid meteor showers.
