Life Lines
John Grindstaff
You’re welcome to sit next to me. I’m harmless, and not homeless. I never was anything but harmless, even when I was homeless.
You sat down next to a talker. Can’t say I didn’t warn you. I like to talk to people until we’re no longer strangers. I think the world would be a better place, if more of us did that. Some people say I talk too much. I guess it’s true. I also think too much. It’s a good thing, and a bad thing.
Although I had some awareness of how important stories could be, I hadn’t felt it, deep down, until a story saved my life, after I became a dirty old homeless man, a few years back. My only possessions were a change of clothes, five books, a tent, and a sleeping bag, all shoved into a backpack, and not much else. I did have plenty of time to think.
I never thought I’d end up homeless. Never thought much about it at all, one way or another. I had no clue who or what a homeless person was. They’re all out there, young and old alike, all kinds, races and shapes. Homeless people are still people.
Almost anyone can end up unhoused. I think that’s the term they use, these days. Sounds like a word defecated by well-fed and well-housed people trying to sound enlightened. It’s like giving something that needs rebuilding from the ground up a new coat of paint. But I’m not talking about glossy terms, or public policy. I’m talking about life, and no one has as much control over their lives as they think they do.
Losing everything isn’t the end. Ending up out there, with no place to go, is traumatic, but you keep on living, despite everything. I have to admit, it wasn’t all bad. There were good, peaceful moments for me. Homeless life is scary and tough, but sometimes it’s freedom and fresh air, as long as your belly’s full of food, and you know you’ll have a next meal. If you’re hungry, the whole world’s mean and ugly. There were days out there when reading was the only way to keep my mind on anything other than food.
Those five books I had with me, helped me through some hard days and nights. They were the possibility of a return to normal life. Whatever normal means. I think we can agree, luck or fate, or whatever you wanna call it, is often harsh, no matter where you live, and everyone suffers pain and loss. A lot of us can find a little humor and some happiness, while living through the bad times.
I find happiness in reading a good book, and listening to the breeze blowing through swaying trees, or the patter of rain on a window or a tent. I’m content to lie on the ground in the shade, thoughts drifting with the rhythmic insect hum of summertime. I love the call-and-answer songs of birds, and watching squirrels live their squirrely lives. I love the swirling dance of falling leaves in autumn. The happy sound of a gently flowing creek or a gushing waterfall soothes my soul and calms my heart.
Listen to me prattle on. I do talk too much. Sometimes, I can’t stop myself. I’m sure you have your own way of finding peace, and a little happiness. Maybe, like me, you love the way the sun and the moon sparkle fresh fallen snow. Maybe both of us love poetry. Maybe you find good memories in music, too.
I find joy in knowing certain people. That joy lives on, after they pass from this world, alongside grief and the selfish wanting of their company in the flesh. I keep their stories in my heart. They’re part of who I am.
We probably have more in common than you thought, after you heard I was once a dirty old homeless man. We’re all living ridiculous lives on a tiny, blue mote, hurtling towards an inevitable end of it all.
The people who hide behind their walls and locked doors are the loudest at condemning the homeless for getting drunk and high. I did smoke weed, when I was homeless. I like being high as much as the next guy, but it was much needed medicine in the moment. I would buy a twelve pack of beer most Fridays. That was payday. Yes, I was homeless, while working as a laborer to earn my money.
As you were sitting there listening to me talk about being homeless, you were picturing a nutjob bum, a worthless drunk or a crazed drug addict. Someone too lazy or too stupid to work, or someone who would rather steal from hard working folks. You can admit it. Most people won’t hold it against you. They think the same thing.
I was a maintenance man at an animal hospital, before I lost everything. They fired me on my day off, over the phone. It wasn’t personal. It was business as usual. One day, I had a job and money to pay bills and buy food. The next day, I was unemployed due to current business needs. It happened faster than I can tell you about it. Then my car broke down, and I didn’t have money for repairs. Then the landlord evicted me from my apartment. It happens when you don’t have rent money. That was the end of my seemingly normal, common life, as I knew it.
Anyway, after working for a day labor place for a year, I finally got a fulltime job at a little window blind factory, running a chop saw. It’s the kind of place that hires anyone desperate enough to work for nine dollars an hour. It’s hard to find a good job, when companies don’t want to hire anyone who might be homeless. I mean, you wouldn’t be homeless, if you weren’t worthless, right? It’s a crazy world. They see you as less in every way.
After working about a month at the factory, and getting a good look at the lay of the land, I set up a camp behind the factory, on a wooded lot between a metal scrapyard and a couple other factories. The constant, metallic clamor was nerve racking, except on Thanksgiving and a couple of days at Christmastime. The railroad was so close, the ground under my little tent trembled when a train rumbled down the tracks. It took a while to adjust to all that noise.
I know it sounds like I’m leaving some details in the shadows. Everyone has parts of their story they keep hidden. Sometimes, it’s tough to think about those parts, but I haven’t burned a single page of that story. It lives inside me.
The one person who helped me, after I first lost everything, was my son. He let me live in his leaky, drafty storage shed. Not long after I started working at the factory, he asked me to figure something out, and leave his shed. It was what his wife wanted. It didn’t matter I had no car, and my pay was so low, I couldn’t afford to even think about finding an apartment.
I had at least seven hundred books, all boxed up and stacked around my little cell-sized living space. The day I left that storage shed, I packed five books to take with me, abandoning the rest to some unknown fate. I never saw them, or my son, again. They’re still a part of me, and I still miss them.
I packed Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, because it’s one of my favorite novels. Has been since I was a kid. I had no idea how important that book would be to me. I also packed an old hardback copy of Alice in Wonderland, that belonged to my mom. She had it since she was a young girl. That book is the only thing I have left that belonged to her. Other than parts of me, I guess.
The other books I packed were random choices, made in the moment. Those five books were the only ties I had to the person I once was, and a thin thread that might lead to the person I could someday become.
I moved into my tent on a hot, humid, July day. I pulled my five books out of my backpack, and put them where I could reach them anytime. I set up a tarp so I could sit outside in all weathers, breathe air that wasn’t claustrophobic, and read my books. That tent was small, and even a short guy like me couldn’t stand upright inside it. I had to have a smaller tent, so I could hide it.
A homeless camp can be dangerous to the one trying to survive there. There’s always the threat someone will steal what little food or possessions you have. The worse threat is the cops finding you, and busting your ass for trespassing, or harassing you for the fun of it. I can’t tell you how many times cops stopped me for the horrific crime of walking the streets while homeless. I stayed to myself while I was out there, far away from the bigger camps. Everyone knows, those places are trouble waiting to happen.
As long as it was warm outside, living in my tent wasn’t so bad. It was a form of freedom. The air was free of charge, unlike everything else in this world, but certainly wasn’t fresh. It smelled like chemicals and rusty metal.
Autumn was beautiful that year, and still comfortably warm, but brought a lot of rain. The dirt around my camp turned into a quagmire. The mud was in and on everything, except my books, which I kept safe enough in a plastic freezer bag. Even my thoughts were muddied. I crawled into my sleeping bag one cool night, and woke the next morning to frigid air seeping into my aching bones.
It was the longest winter of my life. I slipped through a wormhole, or maybe it was a rabbit hole, into an often wet, sometimes frozen, netherworld. I felt like a shade of who I once was, and I began to believe it was inevitable I would die out there, one way or another. I was certain I didn’t deserve any better. It’s okay if you saw me then, and thought of me as something less than you. I felt worthless.
I spent Thanksgiving and Christmas alone, in my tent, splurging on rotisserie chicken and potato salad from the deli at the big box store, and a good bottle of whiskey. I could’ve stayed at the shelter, and eaten hot food, but it’s not like people think it is. The shelter’s a horrible place. I was better off in my tent. I guess I looked like I was making it okay out there, but on the inside, I was on the edge of collapse. I wished I had never been born.
When I peer into a looking glass these days, I see the same old face with those eyes that never were mirrors. They’re telescopes, searching the cosmos. I see the same smile that made the wrinkles. But it’s a different person looking back, than the one who moved into that tent.
The night my mind shattered was windy and icy cold. It was sometime after Christmas. That’s all I can say for certain. Time was solid and unchanging. Nothing seemed to move forward. The entire world was frozen mud. I couldn’t find a way out, living the same day every day with no end in sight.
There’s not much difference between the working homeless, and any other working class life, minus solid walls with a roof, and all that stuff.
Like I said, the night my mind shattered was miserable and cold. I hunkered in my tent, dressed as if I were living at the south pole, not daring to run the little heater because I was low on fuel, and the store was sold out of propane canisters.
The tent fluttered in the wind. A cold, lonely sound that sent shivers through me. My belly was full, after eating a readymade sandwich, and washing it down with a few beers, hoping to numb myself to sleep, sitting on a humped-backed air mattress that was ready to pop any minute, legs stretched out on the tent floor, my warmest blanket draped over my shoulders.
I tried to read, but a hurricane of thoughts, self-recrimination and memories stormed through my head. The grinder in the scrapyard ran on and on, as usual, with that metallic, broken glass like sound. It felt as if I were the only person left on the planet, living in a destroyed world populated only by machines that never stop running.
I remember it like it was last night. Stepping out of the tent, stretching my tight back, and breathing industrialized winter air. I didn’t want to leave the warm blanket, but I had no choice. When you drink too many beers, you pee a lot. At least it wasn’t raining or snowing.
I looked up, past skeletal limbs of surrounding trees, eyes searching the midnight sky for something that was never there. A crescent moon slipped behind drifting clouds.
That harshly beautiful sky. The leaden air. The absolute isolation. The cold all around and inside everything. The meaninglessness of life. It all crashed down on me, and crushed me.
If you’ve been there, you understand. If you haven’t, I couldn’t explain it to you. It’s something you have to feel for yourself.
I made the final decision. First thing the next morning, I’d walk to the store, buy one last twelve pack of beer, a rope, and one last black forest ham and cheese sandwich. Then I would do the deed, as the sun set.
I crawled back inside my tent, feeling different, almost peaceful knowing it would be over, the next day.
I slipped the headlamp I used for reading over my head, and picked up Fahrenheit 451. I was going to finish that novel, even if it was the umpteenth time I read it. I wasn’t going out and leave it halfway finished, or half unread, depending on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. I settled in, sitting cross-legged on my makeshift bed inside my tent, reading the last book I was ever going to read.
Stories are real to me, no matter if they’re fiction or not. It was different that night, as I sat by the campfire on the page, with Montag, and his newfound friends. I always heard their voices as they talked, but that night, they were speaking directly to me. They could see me clear as I could see them. I wasn’t just an unseen observer. I was one of them.
Together, we were alone. Not just in this world or theirs, but in every possible world. Their words wrapped around me, and I understood them as I never had before, like something I always knew, but ignored, because I couldn’t imagine I was even a tiny part of something worth saving and preserving.
That knowledge was a warm shower over cold skin. It wasn’t just me, about to slip off into nothingness. It was all the books, all the characters in those stories. All our family stories that created the ground I walk on, all those people who live inside me. We would be gone from this world as if we never lived. Their stories have to live, and I have to pass those stories on to as many people as possible. Their lives meant something good in this world, and maybe someday, mine will too.
So, I lived through the next day, and the next, and here I am, still living almost five years later, telling you this story. I have a lot on my mind these days. People are doing so many stupid things, it makes me wonder if evolution is reversing. The world seems so mean so much of the time, even though I have a belly full of food every day, and a roof over my head.
As always, there’s hate, war, famine and suffering all over the globe. But don’t tell me there’s nothing good left in this world. I see good people doing good things all the time. There’s all kinds of good in this world. I have shelves full of good books. I have thousands of good stories living in my head. I try to share them as often as I can.
I live in an apartment now. A wonderful woman lives with me. We met when I was still homeless, not long after the night I broke down. She didn’t see a dirty, old, homeless man when she looked at me. She saw the real me.
We have a comfortable bed, heat and air conditioning, a bathroom with a shower, a kitchen with a stove and a refrigerator, and a big comfy couch to sit on. We have mutual respect and love for each other. We have a wonderful life together. I’m more alive than I ever was before. And our little home library is growing, book by book.
Maybe someday, I’ll loan one of those books to someone, and that book will save a life. You never know. It could happen. I keep that copy of Ray Bradbury’s book close to hand at all times. I guess I do have a religion, after all. I believe in the power of a good book.
Well, I guess I better get on home. AJ’s ears probably appreciate some rest from my incessant prattling, but she’ll worry if I’m gone too long. I hope you think about the story I just told you. Maybe next time we meet, you’ll tell me your story. I sure would like to hear it.
~ ~ ~
May 2026
John Grindstaff
You’re welcome to sit next to me. I’m harmless, and not homeless. I never was anything but harmless, even when I was homeless.
You sat down next to a talker. Can’t say I didn’t warn you. I like to talk to people until we’re no longer strangers. I think the world would be a better place, if more of us did that. Some people say I talk too much. I guess it’s true. I also think too much. It’s a good thing, and a bad thing.
Although I had some awareness of how important stories could be, I hadn’t felt it, deep down, until a story saved my life, after I became a dirty old homeless man, a few years back. My only possessions were a change of clothes, five books, a tent, and a sleeping bag, all shoved into a backpack, and not much else. I did have plenty of time to think.
I never thought I’d end up homeless. Never thought much about it at all, one way or another. I had no clue who or what a homeless person was. They’re all out there, young and old alike, all kinds, races and shapes. Homeless people are still people.
Almost anyone can end up unhoused. I think that’s the term they use, these days. Sounds like a word defecated by well-fed and well-housed people trying to sound enlightened. It’s like giving something that needs rebuilding from the ground up a new coat of paint. But I’m not talking about glossy terms, or public policy. I’m talking about life, and no one has as much control over their lives as they think they do.
Losing everything isn’t the end. Ending up out there, with no place to go, is traumatic, but you keep on living, despite everything. I have to admit, it wasn’t all bad. There were good, peaceful moments for me. Homeless life is scary and tough, but sometimes it’s freedom and fresh air, as long as your belly’s full of food, and you know you’ll have a next meal. If you’re hungry, the whole world’s mean and ugly. There were days out there when reading was the only way to keep my mind on anything other than food.
Those five books I had with me, helped me through some hard days and nights. They were the possibility of a return to normal life. Whatever normal means. I think we can agree, luck or fate, or whatever you wanna call it, is often harsh, no matter where you live, and everyone suffers pain and loss. A lot of us can find a little humor and some happiness, while living through the bad times.
I find happiness in reading a good book, and listening to the breeze blowing through swaying trees, or the patter of rain on a window or a tent. I’m content to lie on the ground in the shade, thoughts drifting with the rhythmic insect hum of summertime. I love the call-and-answer songs of birds, and watching squirrels live their squirrely lives. I love the swirling dance of falling leaves in autumn. The happy sound of a gently flowing creek or a gushing waterfall soothes my soul and calms my heart.
Listen to me prattle on. I do talk too much. Sometimes, I can’t stop myself. I’m sure you have your own way of finding peace, and a little happiness. Maybe, like me, you love the way the sun and the moon sparkle fresh fallen snow. Maybe both of us love poetry. Maybe you find good memories in music, too.
I find joy in knowing certain people. That joy lives on, after they pass from this world, alongside grief and the selfish wanting of their company in the flesh. I keep their stories in my heart. They’re part of who I am.
We probably have more in common than you thought, after you heard I was once a dirty old homeless man. We’re all living ridiculous lives on a tiny, blue mote, hurtling towards an inevitable end of it all.
The people who hide behind their walls and locked doors are the loudest at condemning the homeless for getting drunk and high. I did smoke weed, when I was homeless. I like being high as much as the next guy, but it was much needed medicine in the moment. I would buy a twelve pack of beer most Fridays. That was payday. Yes, I was homeless, while working as a laborer to earn my money.
As you were sitting there listening to me talk about being homeless, you were picturing a nutjob bum, a worthless drunk or a crazed drug addict. Someone too lazy or too stupid to work, or someone who would rather steal from hard working folks. You can admit it. Most people won’t hold it against you. They think the same thing.
I was a maintenance man at an animal hospital, before I lost everything. They fired me on my day off, over the phone. It wasn’t personal. It was business as usual. One day, I had a job and money to pay bills and buy food. The next day, I was unemployed due to current business needs. It happened faster than I can tell you about it. Then my car broke down, and I didn’t have money for repairs. Then the landlord evicted me from my apartment. It happens when you don’t have rent money. That was the end of my seemingly normal, common life, as I knew it.
Anyway, after working for a day labor place for a year, I finally got a fulltime job at a little window blind factory, running a chop saw. It’s the kind of place that hires anyone desperate enough to work for nine dollars an hour. It’s hard to find a good job, when companies don’t want to hire anyone who might be homeless. I mean, you wouldn’t be homeless, if you weren’t worthless, right? It’s a crazy world. They see you as less in every way.
After working about a month at the factory, and getting a good look at the lay of the land, I set up a camp behind the factory, on a wooded lot between a metal scrapyard and a couple other factories. The constant, metallic clamor was nerve racking, except on Thanksgiving and a couple of days at Christmastime. The railroad was so close, the ground under my little tent trembled when a train rumbled down the tracks. It took a while to adjust to all that noise.
I know it sounds like I’m leaving some details in the shadows. Everyone has parts of their story they keep hidden. Sometimes, it’s tough to think about those parts, but I haven’t burned a single page of that story. It lives inside me.
The one person who helped me, after I first lost everything, was my son. He let me live in his leaky, drafty storage shed. Not long after I started working at the factory, he asked me to figure something out, and leave his shed. It was what his wife wanted. It didn’t matter I had no car, and my pay was so low, I couldn’t afford to even think about finding an apartment.
I had at least seven hundred books, all boxed up and stacked around my little cell-sized living space. The day I left that storage shed, I packed five books to take with me, abandoning the rest to some unknown fate. I never saw them, or my son, again. They’re still a part of me, and I still miss them.
I packed Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, because it’s one of my favorite novels. Has been since I was a kid. I had no idea how important that book would be to me. I also packed an old hardback copy of Alice in Wonderland, that belonged to my mom. She had it since she was a young girl. That book is the only thing I have left that belonged to her. Other than parts of me, I guess.
The other books I packed were random choices, made in the moment. Those five books were the only ties I had to the person I once was, and a thin thread that might lead to the person I could someday become.
I moved into my tent on a hot, humid, July day. I pulled my five books out of my backpack, and put them where I could reach them anytime. I set up a tarp so I could sit outside in all weathers, breathe air that wasn’t claustrophobic, and read my books. That tent was small, and even a short guy like me couldn’t stand upright inside it. I had to have a smaller tent, so I could hide it.
A homeless camp can be dangerous to the one trying to survive there. There’s always the threat someone will steal what little food or possessions you have. The worse threat is the cops finding you, and busting your ass for trespassing, or harassing you for the fun of it. I can’t tell you how many times cops stopped me for the horrific crime of walking the streets while homeless. I stayed to myself while I was out there, far away from the bigger camps. Everyone knows, those places are trouble waiting to happen.
As long as it was warm outside, living in my tent wasn’t so bad. It was a form of freedom. The air was free of charge, unlike everything else in this world, but certainly wasn’t fresh. It smelled like chemicals and rusty metal.
Autumn was beautiful that year, and still comfortably warm, but brought a lot of rain. The dirt around my camp turned into a quagmire. The mud was in and on everything, except my books, which I kept safe enough in a plastic freezer bag. Even my thoughts were muddied. I crawled into my sleeping bag one cool night, and woke the next morning to frigid air seeping into my aching bones.
It was the longest winter of my life. I slipped through a wormhole, or maybe it was a rabbit hole, into an often wet, sometimes frozen, netherworld. I felt like a shade of who I once was, and I began to believe it was inevitable I would die out there, one way or another. I was certain I didn’t deserve any better. It’s okay if you saw me then, and thought of me as something less than you. I felt worthless.
I spent Thanksgiving and Christmas alone, in my tent, splurging on rotisserie chicken and potato salad from the deli at the big box store, and a good bottle of whiskey. I could’ve stayed at the shelter, and eaten hot food, but it’s not like people think it is. The shelter’s a horrible place. I was better off in my tent. I guess I looked like I was making it okay out there, but on the inside, I was on the edge of collapse. I wished I had never been born.
When I peer into a looking glass these days, I see the same old face with those eyes that never were mirrors. They’re telescopes, searching the cosmos. I see the same smile that made the wrinkles. But it’s a different person looking back, than the one who moved into that tent.
The night my mind shattered was windy and icy cold. It was sometime after Christmas. That’s all I can say for certain. Time was solid and unchanging. Nothing seemed to move forward. The entire world was frozen mud. I couldn’t find a way out, living the same day every day with no end in sight.
There’s not much difference between the working homeless, and any other working class life, minus solid walls with a roof, and all that stuff.
Like I said, the night my mind shattered was miserable and cold. I hunkered in my tent, dressed as if I were living at the south pole, not daring to run the little heater because I was low on fuel, and the store was sold out of propane canisters.
The tent fluttered in the wind. A cold, lonely sound that sent shivers through me. My belly was full, after eating a readymade sandwich, and washing it down with a few beers, hoping to numb myself to sleep, sitting on a humped-backed air mattress that was ready to pop any minute, legs stretched out on the tent floor, my warmest blanket draped over my shoulders.
I tried to read, but a hurricane of thoughts, self-recrimination and memories stormed through my head. The grinder in the scrapyard ran on and on, as usual, with that metallic, broken glass like sound. It felt as if I were the only person left on the planet, living in a destroyed world populated only by machines that never stop running.
I remember it like it was last night. Stepping out of the tent, stretching my tight back, and breathing industrialized winter air. I didn’t want to leave the warm blanket, but I had no choice. When you drink too many beers, you pee a lot. At least it wasn’t raining or snowing.
I looked up, past skeletal limbs of surrounding trees, eyes searching the midnight sky for something that was never there. A crescent moon slipped behind drifting clouds.
That harshly beautiful sky. The leaden air. The absolute isolation. The cold all around and inside everything. The meaninglessness of life. It all crashed down on me, and crushed me.
If you’ve been there, you understand. If you haven’t, I couldn’t explain it to you. It’s something you have to feel for yourself.
I made the final decision. First thing the next morning, I’d walk to the store, buy one last twelve pack of beer, a rope, and one last black forest ham and cheese sandwich. Then I would do the deed, as the sun set.
I crawled back inside my tent, feeling different, almost peaceful knowing it would be over, the next day.
I slipped the headlamp I used for reading over my head, and picked up Fahrenheit 451. I was going to finish that novel, even if it was the umpteenth time I read it. I wasn’t going out and leave it halfway finished, or half unread, depending on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. I settled in, sitting cross-legged on my makeshift bed inside my tent, reading the last book I was ever going to read.
Stories are real to me, no matter if they’re fiction or not. It was different that night, as I sat by the campfire on the page, with Montag, and his newfound friends. I always heard their voices as they talked, but that night, they were speaking directly to me. They could see me clear as I could see them. I wasn’t just an unseen observer. I was one of them.
Together, we were alone. Not just in this world or theirs, but in every possible world. Their words wrapped around me, and I understood them as I never had before, like something I always knew, but ignored, because I couldn’t imagine I was even a tiny part of something worth saving and preserving.
That knowledge was a warm shower over cold skin. It wasn’t just me, about to slip off into nothingness. It was all the books, all the characters in those stories. All our family stories that created the ground I walk on, all those people who live inside me. We would be gone from this world as if we never lived. Their stories have to live, and I have to pass those stories on to as many people as possible. Their lives meant something good in this world, and maybe someday, mine will too.
So, I lived through the next day, and the next, and here I am, still living almost five years later, telling you this story. I have a lot on my mind these days. People are doing so many stupid things, it makes me wonder if evolution is reversing. The world seems so mean so much of the time, even though I have a belly full of food every day, and a roof over my head.
As always, there’s hate, war, famine and suffering all over the globe. But don’t tell me there’s nothing good left in this world. I see good people doing good things all the time. There’s all kinds of good in this world. I have shelves full of good books. I have thousands of good stories living in my head. I try to share them as often as I can.
I live in an apartment now. A wonderful woman lives with me. We met when I was still homeless, not long after the night I broke down. She didn’t see a dirty, old, homeless man when she looked at me. She saw the real me.
We have a comfortable bed, heat and air conditioning, a bathroom with a shower, a kitchen with a stove and a refrigerator, and a big comfy couch to sit on. We have mutual respect and love for each other. We have a wonderful life together. I’m more alive than I ever was before. And our little home library is growing, book by book.
Maybe someday, I’ll loan one of those books to someone, and that book will save a life. You never know. It could happen. I keep that copy of Ray Bradbury’s book close to hand at all times. I guess I do have a religion, after all. I believe in the power of a good book.
Well, I guess I better get on home. AJ’s ears probably appreciate some rest from my incessant prattling, but she’ll worry if I’m gone too long. I hope you think about the story I just told you. Maybe next time we meet, you’ll tell me your story. I sure would like to hear it.
~ ~ ~
May 2026
