I live on food stamps, which for some years were exactly $6.40 per day of a 30-day month. With these, I buy four categories of food: cheddar cheese in 2-lb blocks, loaves of whole-wheat bread, "calories" and "vitamins". Calories, meant to represent the cost of sleeping outside, is usually a whole box of cookies. Vitamins is usually between 1/2 and 1 lb of deli salads. So I buy those two things every weekday, and bread as needed, and that's easy enough, but the cheese?
Well, each weekend I buy a big box of cheap sandwich cream cookies, a pack of bologna, some green onions and a green pepper, and either a bag of shredded cabbage or a few carrots, all meant to last two days, leaving the second day's $6.40 to cover the cost of the cheese.
One way I've dealt with the difficulty of doing Number Two lately is to eat less bread and more cookies and salad. But the weekend's sandwiches (with fewer sliced vegetables since the cutting board and knife are harder to wash) matter to my finances, so for weekends I resign myself to doing Number Two twice per day. The weekend of April 25 and 26, I ran into trouble one night thanks to friends. This past weekend - well, last night and this morning - I think I was punished for saying I didn't value enough buildings' protection against vermin.
So at 9:15 P.M. last night, as I was loading my depleted food bag, last satchel, into my cart so I could go to Safeway, an odd insect landed in it, and all my efforts to get it out only pushed it further in. Of course I didn't reach Safeway in time to use its restroom, but it wasn't that urgent. Yet.
This morning I woke at 6:00, and by the time I got going at 6:40, it was getting urgent. I was able to hold out at Burke-Gilman Playground Park until 7:32, then, drawn by the rumour of a customers' restroom at Metropolitan Market nearby, went there.
They were doing their seniors' hour, so I went and waited some more at BGPP, but at 8:06 gave up.
Confusing directions brought me not to the store's customer restrooms, but to their employee break room, where a woman kindly offered to show me the right way, then, seeing me struggle to get my cart back down the stairs, even more kindly sent me to the employee restrooms, which are on the ground floor. There, well, let's just say I left rather less toilet paper than I'd found. So I spent $9.40 of food stamps and bought a newspaper too.
When I got back to BGPP the restrooms were open, and I could do the rest of my current morning routine in peace.
There was at least one bit of neat stuff this morning near the customer restrooms I didn't see: Snow. In Seattle. In May. Well, no, of course not, it was pretty icy, and was probably shaved ice left over from something they'd received, but it was still neat.
Anyway, I couldn't help wondering, this morning, what if I had a job? This may sound implausible, but actually, a fair number of homeless people work. I have, myself, two winters of tax preparation. Those times, I joined a health club to get reliable showers and such - but now, tax preparation is "essential", but health clubs aren't. Of course a worker would need a shower, so no park restroom would be enough, but surely no employee should have to tolerate a morning like I had.
Metropolitan Market posts its hours, and keeps to the hours it posts. It is reliable. In contrast, the park restrooms' hours are only posted in obscure places, and unrealistically pretend that all the rooms are unlocked at 7 A.M. and locked at 9 P.M.; unsurprisingly, in practice, those hours aren't kept to.
Of course, Metropolitan Market is a retail store, with owners who make their money from customers. In contrast, the parks make their money from taxes, and are owned by the city, right? What's that you say, they're public land funded by the public? What a silly notion. If that were true, wouldn't they be responsible to the public, the way Metropolitan Market is to its owners and customers?
So it's wrong for us to expect anything different, but still, melancholy reflections on the plight of my employed peers weighed me down, and I hadn't the heart even to visit Ravenna Park today.
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