A reflection, meditation,perhaps. Just some words, not many, some sorrow mixed in. Sorrow, nostalgia, fear, frustration, a prayer, a longing. I could never, in short order, say everything I’m feeling, besides exhausted.
The old crowd gathered at The Last Mile in my last post. Okay, so there is no such place. But, then, there is, indeed – there always are such places in our mind — Middle Earth, Brigadoon — in our deepest imagining. Our fictions are like that; they become real. We escape into them, even if they are affectionately grubby little watering holes on the urban landscape, but nonetheless places, for some of us, capable of enchantment.
So…in real time, in real hot spaces…
I went through a great deal of stress today, June 16, 2025, as President of the St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church, Clearwater, Florida conference of the St. Vincent dePaul Society. I, like almost anyone, am happy to help people in distress. That’s why I volunteered for the SVdPS here and up north. But often, you are trying to help people, God bless them, who jump from one of life’s lily pads to the next. (In some ways, I feel like that, and like that’s what I’ve been doing up to now– up and down from Florida, east and west in Massachusetts, down to Rhode Island to boot during a reporter’s career, and now in etirement, running -that other tired metaphor — pillar to post — no direction home.)
I was trying to help a grandmother with a daughter and three infant children. they’d gotten my personal number from a y oung woman and her 11-year-old daughter whom we’d helped get into a motel — the same motel this other family was thrown out of for want of money. I knew we –the Society — didn’t have the money to meaningfully help this woman and her family, but she called me repeatedly. I knew we didn’t have anywhere to put them — a woman, her daughteer and three children ages about eight down to four months! Shelter don’t take children. So began the expensive, time-consuming search for meaningless help — meaningless because temporary: three days. And expensive.
My rock and savior and help in all such SVdP-related adventures such as this is the Filipino-American woman named Imelda who is the institutonal memory of the St. Catherine’s Society, having been Treasurer for a very long time (a job I’m incompetent to do), and, before me, after the departure of the former President, Acting President. She has long, deep experience in dealing with these situations and is also very realistic. ( I became President by default: nobody else wanted the job.) She is generous and compassionate, hard-working but, again, realistic and recognizes the financial and human limits of compassion for needy people, many of whom will likely never alter their situation brought on by faulty life-habits and familiy dysfunction. You do what you can, even more than seems possible — but also know, again there must be a limit. Imelda is also a 74-year-old wife, mother and grandmother — and has been battling melanoma for twenty years, going in and out of remission — and currently on a new phase of medical treatment involving weekly infusions followed by a day of rest. Her energy and dedication has not abated, but she is having often painful side effects in her back. She did what she could to arrange a motel for this family until we ran into enormous bureacracy that would take more than a few hours to work out. She generally had warned me about getting into these “motel” messes.
And, after a period of exhausting effort on her part, I was mostly necessarily on my one on this ill-advised venture helping people with no car, no money and no place to go. I only knew that they claimed that in two days they would have a trailer available for them north of here. They only needed to bridge those two days. I set about trying to make this happen for them.
I won’t go into all the details — what I’ll offer is enough and I knew it was taking up an entire day I had needed for preparing to go on a trip to the northeast in two days.
I drove the grandmother, age estimate late fifties, early sixties, from the money advance chain Amscot, to which she apparently has frequent recourse and which, this time, she reached by getting loaned ( by someone) barely enough money for her to hire a thirteen dollar Uber ride. (She has no car and was getting around by bus!) She apparently also owed Amscot money and there are fees and so the $360 I gave her (the amount it was going to cost her for two nights in the Holiday Inn Express) was immediatelyi reduced to apx. $353 money to these people while depositing and instantly having drawn off a little of my Society’s donated $360. I thought she had some money in her bank account so she could check into the motel. But her credit card was rejected. It was back to another Amscot to WITHDRAW the money she’d just deposited so she could deposit in her checking account. Back at the motel, her card was rejected again. Thhe funds were still insufficient or not yet available. I finally wound up picking up the $360 on my personal credit card, which is already stretched too far. I just had to end this whole agony. It was the only alternative to simply saying to grandma, I can’t help you — you and your family will have to spend the night on the street and then go looking for someone else to help you.
The woman gave me a hug. I saw her daughter camping out with the three kids, the youngest four months, no husband or father in sight, the grandmother’s husband long dead from a liver damaged from booze — this family from Texas, the other homeless women and her daughter I’d placed in another motel at the end of last week was from Tennessee…These are wanderers.
Yes, the grandmother gave me a hug. I pray for her and all of them — and hope they don’t cause trouble at the motel or that my money doesn’t become involved….or that something doesn’t go wrong for them while they’re there.
No car, no money, maybe a temporary job at WaWa.
Much of the country lives this way, in utter dysfunction. We could give them money or a home…but they just don’t have much, and sometimes much good judgement or drive or talent or ambition to escape their circumstances. Often they grew up this way.
My whole day in the 90-degree heat trying to get them settled — for two days only. Then what? (The motel required paperwork we were willing to offer as a 501C tax-exempt charity. But they insisted we had to email it to them along with pictures….insisted it was not really that complicated, though it certainly was and time was of the essence and in our little office we lacked the uploading ability and had no idea how we’d load a picture — and they wouldn’t take cash.
Enough! Enough!
Life is difficult. Charity can be a challenge. Pray.
Epilogue: While I was in New Hampshire on my travels, the grandmother called repeatedly on my private phone to say that the daughter and she had had a falling out and that the daughter had thrown her out and she was on the street again. She called repeatedly, crying. I was able to get put in touch with a female police homeless liaison officer in the Florida area who, over the phone, assured me she had spoken to the woman, offered her alternative situations, but that nothing suited her — and counseled me that this woman was just one of those perennially distressed people who will only come around when they’ve had mental health counseling and/or after they’ve necessarily spent time on the street. I was not happy to hear this, but it was realistic counsel, and very much, ultimately, what I knew I’d need to hear — as I was also counseled by a woman close to me that you can help people, but you can’t always rescue them.
End of story.
19 Cent Notebook 