About a month ago, I got a Facebook message from a woman in my neighborhood.
I’d met her last fall on the playground of our local elementary school, Reiche, while I was out walking around and talking to people, attempting to get elected to the Portland City Council.
A young mom. Hip. Gauges in her ears, tattoos on her arms and a Joy Division t-shirt. She was chatting comfortably with the other public school parents, watching one of her kids bounce around on the jungle gym. She seemed like a really good neighbor.
She’s texting me to find out if I know anybody working at the Shalom House, one of the local social service agencies. Sure, I do. What’s up?
She tells me that she smelled a strange smell coming from the apartment next to her family’s earlier in the day. “We thought it may have been a sewage leak,” she says. “I was the only tenant that said something.”
A short while later, the building’s maintenance crew shows up, opens the door and finds her neighbor dead, his body slowly rotting. He’s been lying there for a week. Alone. “It sounds so crude and horrible,” she says. “It’s just such a sad way to end a life. I started crying, and I didn’t even know him.”
She’s hungry to connect with somebody who did.
“I don’t even know what I would say other than give condolences,” she messages me. “I just have an overwhelming feeling to reach out to anyone that knew him.”
So I put her in touch with a friend of mine who works at Shalom House, where her neighbor used to work, and it turns out that my friend not only knew her neighbor pretty well, but even trained him to do his job. The conversation helps her to feel a little more centered.
When I ask why she reached out to me, especially given that she didn’t know me very well, she says, “Your actions make it clear that you actually care about people and want to try to make Portland better.” I love the way she phrases that. Because she’s right, I do want to try.
. I want to be somebody who doesn’t just give in and acquiesce to the soul-sucking vampire of a world with so much odious cruelty.
That stench bothers me. And it’s not just the stink of bodies rotting in West End apartments, emitting odors that seep under doorways and infiltrate the homes of adorable families.
It’s the stink of neglect as dozens of people with no place to go die in the streets of Portland every year. It’s the acrid smell of sulfur as the bombs our tax dollars pay for explode in villages across the Middle East. It’s the lingering scent of bed pans in the nursing homes where so many of our elders lie lonely and in pain.
I hate it. But this stench is reality, and I love it for that. I try to accept us humans for what we are. Flawed.
Life can be heavy, but I don’t have any big heavy solutions, and I don’t write books, at least not yet.
Nothing I write these days takes very long to read. I’m not offering a week’s worth of groceries or even a full meal. I write snacks. A ceramic plate of apple slices. A basket of salt and vinegar potato chips. Donut holes.
I love imagining people taking a break, sipping some coffee and following a Facebook link to read something I wrote. Finding a little sweetness. Sharing it with a friend. And going back to work, a little bit more grounded. A little bit lifted out of their daily grind. The smell of cinnamon in the air.