Yesterday I sat down on a low, rather ugly cinder block wall that separates my neighbor’s yard from mine. The wall is made less ugly by the fact it has been painted red and somewhat matches my front door and the red walkway tiles that lead up to it. Sitting on the short wall made leaning over to pull weeds out of the gravel drive a bit easier. My neighbors are selling their house and I don’t feel obliged to make my place look nicer as much as to protect my investment – as in, I don’t want the property values around me to come down because I have a weedy front yard.
Moments like this invariably bring up that Talking Heads song, Once in a Lifetime, and I ask myself, How did I get here?
I also often recall a short story I read during my college days that features a neighbor who runs out of his house whenever a leaf falls on his perfect lawn. Not that I keep an immaculate yard, but it can lead one to wondering what’s the point?
The tent encampment around the CVS pharmacy near here has been removed, as well as the ones on the open land near the skatepark and along the aqueduct under the highway 242 overpass.
I’m not sure where the people went who were there. I don’t have a lot of firsthand information except for two unhoused women who I spoke with that were charging their phones at an outlet next to the water machine in front of the CVS. They were sitting against the wall eating Chinese food out of large Styrofoam clamshells when I pulled up on my bike. I asked if they minded if I locked up next to them there on the curvy S-shaped bike rack that is coming unbolted from the cement. Bike racks are a rarity in Concord so I appreciate this one despite its tenuous hold on the ground.
The younger white woman, wore a pink, midriff, short sleeve knit that showed off a slight, pale paunch. She spoke so fast it was hard for my brain to process her words but what I could gather made sense. It wasn’t salad talk. The shelters were full.
As she spoke her eyes darted around and she turned her head this way and that as a grass-eating animal might between bites. The short, older black woman (whom I’d had occasion to speak with before) contrasted her friend’s quickness with sad deliberation.
I can’t say I have her pronoun right. I didn’t have occasion to use it, but, dressed to hide her sex in an oversized, long-sleeve oxford shirt tucked into baggy chinos, her story makes me think she might prefer to identify as him/he:
“I had to leave a shelter because this one woman didn’t like transgender people. She told everyone I exposed myself to her. Now why would I do that? I hate my body. I’ve always hated my body. I’m not proud of it. Why would I try and show it to somebody?”
I had met her this past summer before leaving on my cross-country road trip. Same place. Then, she was distraught over CVS not allowing her to put money on a phone card. I heard more of her story when she told me she was trying to get money together to go on a bus to visit her son in Las Vegas.
The website Next Door has one of the longest threads I’ve ever seen on the subject of unhoused people in Concord. There is a very minimal amount of Not in My Backyard comments and the concern and thought people have put into the conversation is heartening. There are even a few unhoused people who have shared comments or given a glimpse of their story.
I ride my bike by the concrete aqueduct under six-lane highway 242 two or three times a week on the way to the climbing gym. The former camp was there along the dirt bank above this human-made floodway but below the sidewalk. It was accessed by a big hole cut in the chain link fence. It’s usually night by the time I come back from the gym. Sometimes I would see the glow from a phone or light inside a tent or hear soft voices. Around Christmas, when it was easy for me to believe in Peace on Earth, I found myself feeling envious of these nomads. It’s easy to make up stories and romanticize from my privileged position… and perhaps there is some joy in these campers who can set themselves apart from the thronging mass of people who seem to carry on with a sort of hive-like mind.
No doubt, I feel some pride and superiority myself–being one of the few people to dare ride a bike in this car-dominated, concrete town. Being outside of that car-bubble makes me closer to these castaways. But yeah, I’d rather have a bikeable city and they’d probably rather have a place to live.
So back to protecting my overpriced investment—the current value of my small, 800 sq. ft. house is likely great enough to buy a whole apartment building in some other parts of this country.
The truth is, I’m not only trying to maintain the house’s value. I’ve grown to like weeding. It’s meditative. When my mother was dying of lung cancer, I spent many hours at my home in San Leandro pulling burr clover from the large grass lawn, foolishly imagining I was helping to eradicate her disease—as if each plant represented some fractional part of the malignancy that I could psychically obliterate. I just had to put in the time and be thorough I imagined. We do what we can to cope.
My ex-wife’s mom had taught me the name of that particular weed. On one of her first visits to our new house she had disappeared for some time on her own pulling this clover with burrs from our front yard. She suggested it was the bane of homeowners’ existence though I think she might have also gotten some pleasure out of the pulling.
Most weeds come up nicely if the soil is moist. Burr clover spreads out low to the ground weaving between the blades of grass but if you gather the spread and pinch the central tap root, the whole thing comes up like a scribble scrabble overlay that once lifted reveals the fine, symmetric teeth of the lawn.
We don’t have grass here. In the back is red lava pebbles and black, wood chip with more wood chip in front. There is chunky, gray gravel along the road and as a second parking area next to the concrete drive. All of these areas still manage to get weeds even with a groundcloth underlay.
I’d guesstimate I spend 30 to 40 hours a year weeding. This could be cut to two or three hours if I did what many do and just douse the areas with glyphosate–the main ingredient in Monsanto’s popular weed-killer Round Up. Or I could do what neighbor Phillip does down the street and just let the weeds take over. Depending on the time of year, he has wild fennel taller than himself and yellow grass up to his waist along with enormous prickly pear. In the back yard, the aptly named succulent, mother of millions, have mostly taken over except for a garden bed of healthy-looking marijuana plants. The seeds apparently run about $10 each for this crop.
It’s all sort of a secret garden for the birds which seem to be very fond of his place and why wouldn’t they be since he also puts out bird seed on plates set atop large ceramic, glazed pots arranged one atop the other in an hour glass shape that makes climbing the slippery surface impossible for squirrels.
He still has Bernie Sanders signs up in his front window as well as the listening hours for different programs on KPFA. I can count on him as an ally in braving these mean streets by bicycle. There is a contingent of us here. I want to give a celebratory wave each time I see another bicyclist.
A man named “Smitty” often posts to the Concord bike group on Facebook. I spoke to him at the bike valet parking and pop-up repair shop he helps with at music events at Todos Santos Plaza. I’m interested in doing some bike advocacy work with the city, but it’s not for him. He simply likes getting bikes into people’s hands.
It’s important for me to remember that there are good people in the world otherwise my misanthropic side starts to creep in. Maybe the meek will inherit the earth and maybe we will get some bike lanes out here in Concord and maybe some small homes too for those people who must be hiding now in some areas that I don’t have occasion to pass by so often.
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I’ve begun archiving some of my summer trip on this website, so you can go there if you have an interest in reading about my adventures visiting the fourteen places I lived as a child. My visits to my old home states of Texas and Mississippi are now posted. Also, the internet helped me locate one of the few places I lived in Texas that I wasn’t able to find when I was there. I found the address on an old drug store photo processing envelope. The photo below is a screenshot from a Google cam. (Now the only place left to find is the Shady Oaks Ranch.)
I don’t feel compelled to visit this place in person. There is nothing too special about the Fall Meadow apartment complex except that it was the first place we lived in Denton. It’s also where I lived when I first got glasses and could see the world clearly for the first time in several years. (I believe I had pretty good vision until I was about seven and then there was a steep decline until I got glasses when I was about nine.) Another fairly clear memory from this complex is learning the song Delta Dawn which was popular on the radio at the time. My sister and I got in the habit of singing it over and over again. My favorite line: She’s 41 and her papa still calls her baby.
Spotty West Goes East 