American Dreams

I dreamed too.

I dreamed of owning a home and being a dad. I dreamed of a family and friends and long summer evenings catching fireflies with my daughter in our front yard.

I dreamed of snowmen and Christmas lights and homemade soup on cold winter Saturdays.

I worked hard for that dream. I learned a business that I had no previous experience in. I studied, and toiled, and busted my butt and became one of the best there was in the business.

In 2004, at 41 years of age, with a 7-year-old daughter, I bought my dream home.

It was basic. A 2200 square foot, three-bedroom ranch in rural Williamson County TN, where I lived at the time. It was just her and I. Her mom and I had divorced several years prior. I didn’t remarry, choosing instead to focus on my little girl and being her dad. My house became my refuge. It was my safe place. It was where I could shut the door on the burdens of the day, and find peace and quiet. I bought it. I didn't sneak into it under the cover of darkness and then claim some right to stay there. I did it right.

I lived there for almost four years, until 2008. That’s when the dreaming stopped.

The economy collapsed in 2008, taking out the entire industry I worked in. I lost my job, then I lost my home.

Then I lost my dignity, and my sense of pride, and the only thing I had left was a storage unit full of belongings, and my fatherhood.

From May of 2008, until May of 2014, apart from about 7 months when I stayed at a friend’s condo while it was listed for sale, I was homeless.

I lived in my car, showered at the county Rec center, took every ignoble odd job and menial task I could find, and survived. I often made a meal out of the sample stands at the grocery store, the embarrassment of getting back in the line again after a few minutes, to get "seconds" of cheese spread on a single cracker, or a tiny piece of deli meat, turning my face to crimson. 

I was at the mercy of public restrooms. I tried to hide my plight.

I never panhandled. I never made my homelessness an issue. I worked as much as I could. I stayed in Nashville because my daughter was in danger at her mother’s house. Her mom had remarried and the man was a monster. I stayed to show him where the boundaries were. To remind him that even though I was a homeless man, I was still a man. If he went too far with his cruelty toward my daughter, I would be there, in all my fury.

It was two years before I could even drive down the twisting country road where my former home sits. The first time I drove past it, I had to pull off the road. The sobs were racking my sides and I couldn’t see to drive. I have tears in my eyes right now as I write this and it’s been nine years. It was my home. My dream.

I didn’t sneak in here. My grandparents came here legally, did things legally, became citizens, and honored the laws. They did it right.

For weeks now, all I hear about are “dreamers.” People Obama let off the hook. People who weren’t here legally, didn’t come in through the front door, didn’t play by the rules.

I hear about their dreams. Their hopes. Their contribution. I hear how many voices champion their causes and care for their needs.

But when I was destitute, living in a Volvo 850, showering at a gym, and eating dollar hotdogs at Sam’s club –often paid for in pennies- nobody even noticed.

Barack Obama has come out to criticize President Trump over his ending the “DACA” act. Obama. The man who caused this wreck. The man who talks of “dreamers” and their dreams.

I wrote to the former president while he was still in office. When I was homeless. I let him know about my plight. I told him what had happened. I told him about my daughter, and the harsh reality she faced with a homeless daddy. I compared my fatherhood to his and asked him to consider how my life hurts, and how it would be painful for him if he had to put his precious daughters through what mine was going through.

I never heard a word in reply. Not an email. Not an autographed 8x10 glossy, signed by some intern and stuffed hastily in a manila envelope, and mailed out to “some homeless guy in Tennessee.”
I know he read my letter, because not long after that, the White House started reading my blogs. (I have stat counter on them so I can see when someone checks them out)
I know they knew I was out there. Out there in my car, shivering in the cold and sweltering in the heat.

My dreams became nightmares. The nightmare of over 350 job applications without an offer. The nightmare of three job offers rescinded because of the high cost of the Obamacare mandate. The nightmare of nowhere to go, and nowhere to call home. No rest when I was weary. No shelter from the elements.

No shelter for my soul. No place for my dreams.

I hear them crying out from every rooftop these days, talking about “The Dreamers” and how their dreams need to be protected. But those same voices were silent while my dreams –and the dreams of my little girl- were crushed. Squeezed in the slow, vice-like grip of hopelessness. Choked out by the stifling lack of oxygen in the Obama years. Squeezed to death, by the sheer insignificance of my life in their eyes.

So, when I hear Obama and his minions bemoaning the fate of “dreamers” and I know those people aren’t even American citizens, and I know they broke the law just getting here, and I know they have a champion in their corner that was supposed to be working for me…well, forgive my callous bitterness.

I think of the Vets who died, literally in their cars in the parking lots of the V.A. clinics. I think of the coal miners and the home builders and the small business owners who shuttered their buildings and watched their dreams die over the last nine years. I listen for the same outcry I’m hearing now for illegals. I get nothing in response.

The same nothing I got when I was homeless, and broken, and desperate.

Unless and until the voices start calling out in defense of the fate of Americans and our dreams… nothing else they say will matter to me.

We’ve waited long enough. We’ve watched while you threw trillions at foreign countries and passed laws that favored foreign trespassers while American citizens were ravaged.

You’ve failed us. You ignored our voices and our dreams for nine years now.

And now when you finally talk about dreams…it’s the dreams of those who broke the law. All the while, law abiding Americans watch as their hopes take a beating, and their dreams burn to the ground.

I still dream of my yellow ranch house. I still dream of my garden and my workshop and cutting my grass. I still dream of owning a home again one day. But my dreams only matter to me. Those we elected to help us achieve those dreams are too concerned with the dreams of people who can’t even legally vote for them!

They champion their dreams in full view and bold colors, while my dreams fade and turn gray.

What about us? What about our dreams?

I fear my dream home will only be that…a dream. These professional politicians are too busy defending this non-constituency to worry about their constituents. If I ever do achieve my dreams again, it will be in spite of them…not because of them.

Still Homeless...

Two weeks ago, I celebrated my third anniversary working at Liberty University.

In May, I celebrated –if you want to call it that- three years of living indoors, after spending most of the previous six years, homeless. I should be thankful, and I am, but the bloom is starting to wear off the rose.

When you lose your home, something inside you dies. There is a vault full of memories that seems ever-more empty as time rolls on. It has unfilled shelves where moments were supposed to be, but aren’t. You remember the Christmases, and the summer evenings and the clear, cold winter nights when you sat outside and looked at the Milky Way and you know there should have been more. You come home to a house that isn’t yours, and holds no memories for you, and you simply live there. But it’s not home. Not really.

The last few weeks this has hit me hard, and I’ve caught myself shedding tears at odd moments during the day. The sadness of losing the home I’d worked for and had grown to love, coupled with the reality that given my situation now, it’s unlikely I’ll ever own a home again…at times has been too much.

I was thinking about the folks in Houston. So far, almost 200,000 people have lost their homes. That’s an enormous number. That’s the size of a lot of entire cities in the U.S.

I feel so much sadness for them. What if you simply can’t rebuild? Your home is in your heart, but it needs a physical embodiment, and our houses become that. I know mine was. My house represented the struggles I’d had and the victories I’d won up to that point. I worked hard to get that house. I survived a divorce that crushed me, the soul-crushing time-restriction of child visitation. I ached with loneliness when my daughter wasn’t with me, but I soldiered on. That house, was our place. Her's and mine. It was full of peace and calm, and stood in stark contrast to her mother’s house, with its tension and violence. She wrote the foreword to my latest book and she described it as her safe-haven. And it’s gone.

But it’s not gone from our hearts and that hurts. It’s a picture on my wall –invisible to anyone else- that silently compares itself to this cramped townhouse we now live in. It’s a vivid scene in my mind as I drive down the twisting country lane I lived on and see my beautiful little yellow rancher as I round the curve. Only now I must drive on past, because it’s not my address anymore.

More and more it feels like it was my last chance at home ownership. It was so perfect for me…that house of mine. It was just right. Nothing about my current address is just right. Nothing. I sleep here, I cook here, I shower here. Repeat daily. I own one couch. We have a crooked little kitchen table that is so warped and sloping your plate will slide off if you’re not careful. We have one chair for the table. We can’t even eat dinner together, my daughter and I. We hardly care because we both feel the same way about this place. It’s just a rental. It’s not home. All our memories lie in a 2000 square-foot yellow ranch house on five acres in some other part of the world. We just live here. But we don’t live here.

It’s not that I’m not thankful for my job and for not being homeless anymore and especially for having my daughter with me where she’s safe. I am. But it’s been three years now. The reality of what I went through has sunk in entirely and the truth about where I am and where I am likely going, has also shown its face. I am lost. Lost, and feeling like this will be my lot in life for the rest of my days. 

A tenant. 

Physically living here, but emotionally living hundreds of miles away. 

I’m stuck. 

I haven’t succumbed to the idea yet…not entirely. I fear that when I do, I’ll be completely without hope from that point on. Living without hope is the worst form of death. Brennan Manning wrote in “The Ragamuffin Gospel” that there are three ways to commit suicide: Take your own life, let yourself die, or live without hope. The last choice is the most dubious, because it takes so long. You’re already dead and you don’t know it. Or you do, and you feel it constricting you and swallowing you a little more each day. I feel that way. I feel –for the first time in my life- that it’s pointless to dream now. That it’s past the point of planning for something better. That this is all there is, and all there will be, and it’s time to get on with the sad tedium of trudging through each day for the rest of my life.

The only hope I cling to is that my daughter will have a far better life than she would have had otherwise, had we stayed as we were. That, and the hope that maybe God is still working in this, and this isn’t the final chapter for me yet. He owes me nothing. I don’t have any expectations of Him depositing a house on my lap, or some mystery millions in my bank account.

I have to pretend. I have to smile and make-believe that this is okay with me. I have to deny the ache in my soul, that cries out for a real home and some real friendships and some real hope and a job that elicits pride and a sense of accomplishment. There is a line in Thomas Wolfe’s classic “You Can’t Go Home Again” and I think of it often. It fits me now and the mere fact that I am living this quotation breaks my heart all over again. But I must live this, or the pain and loss will overwhelm me. It is this:

“Man was born to live, to suffer and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the end. But we must, dear Fox, deny it, all along the way.”

There are those who’ve had it worse than me. I know this. But comparing pain and heartache is a fool’s errand. I’ve had all my heart can take. Maybe your heart could have taken more. Then too, maybe I would have smiled and laughed at your tragedies. It’s impossible to measure and quantify.

Three years have come and gone since I woke up from that nightmare. But I woke to find that some of that dream is reality, and I’ll have to deal with it for the rest of my days.

In some ways, I am still very much a homeless man. In need of a home. A haven. My own little castle to defend. Until then, the warrior in my soul… he who would defend that castle and it’s residents, remains at large. Wandering. Scanning the horizon for the shadowy outline of the place he calls home. Hoping to see it soon. Fearing that he won’t.

Test

Test

The America I Knew...

This morning I was reading a random section of a book I wrote in 2013, “Remembering America.” In the final chapter, I wrote these words:

     “America has become a disjointed, sectarian, broken land where neighbors don’t last because nobody has neighbors anymore. Not really. Not like we did.

…The extent of our interaction with our neighbor is when we wave hello as we pull out for work in the morning. We don’t know them. We don’t know what brought them here to this community. We never find out where they’re from in this country, or where their family is from in the world. We never learn their son’s middle name and if it has some family history. We have never tasted their mother’s homemade bread, or borrowed a cup of sugar, or shared a glass of tea on the front porch on a summer evening. Great people with great stories live 30 feet from us and we never find out anything about them until we read their obituary one day unexpectedly. Then we pause for a moment, wince at how we should have reached out to them, and wish we had that chance now. Then our cell phone rings and we are dragged back into the tyranny of the urgent and returned by our digital wardens to the prison of upward mobility.

…America was founded by neighbors. She was built by neighbors. She ascended to unbelievable heights because we were a nation of neighbors. We were a community. We were fiercely independent in the ways that mattered. We worked hard, got things for ourselves without the government helping us, took no handouts, but gave them when we saw a need.

…Nowadays, we live in the age of talk-radio, and social media. Nobody sees the face behind the voice and nobody really cares to. We can call Rush or Sean or watch MSNBC and become angry, bitter, and violent towards the other side –whichever side that might be- and we don’t feel even the slightest twinge about the slow death of our human spirit because we are detached from everyone else. Our sense of humanity is slipping because we aren’t interacting with humans anymore. We aren’t neighbors anymore. Twitter and Facebook have become poor replacements for summer cookouts and get-togethers, and having a beer with your neighbor while sitting in lawn chairs in your driveway on a summer evening.

…We don’t drive down the street at the end of the workday, and see the neighborhood, and attach a funny story to each address on each mailbox. Nobody waves to us as we pull up. If they do wave, it’s reflexive like swatting a fly. They don’t call out our name as we get out of the car. They don’t amble over casually with a lawn rake still in their hands and ask us how we are and remind us that the big game is this weekend and oh yeah…Me and Jim and Pat are getting a truckload of manure for the gardens if you want to join in. They don’t come over with a tray of cookies or a pot roast, or some free tickets to the circus that someone at work gave them, but they can’t go and they knew your kids would just love the circus. And they knew those kids by name.

…I wish we were still like this…like neighbors. Because we’d have a much better America. We truly loved each other, and you simply can’t be mean to those you really love.

…They were really our neighbors. We were a real community. We cared deeply about each other because we’d had so many years together. Time was our bond. It fostered love and endeared us to each other in ways that we have never found since. Ways that Social Media erodes.

…..If only we could somehow capture this again. If only we could somehow become friends like we were then. If it was safe enough to drop our guard and lower our defenses and let ourselves care deeply about the people whose houses we drive past each night as we pull up in our driveway…maybe we could see that America again. If we slowed down and learned the amazing stories that make up the people on our street, if we became their friend, maybe we could have a better America again. How could we not? How could we not make this place better for everyone if we returned to a place and a time when we knew each other…when we loved each other?

I wrote these excerpts and that book four years ago, in a Panera in Franklin, TN. I was homeless, lonely, lost, and desperate. I have a home now and a job. But in so many ways I still feel like the person I just described Homeless, lonely, lost, and desperate. I crash-landed on this new planet and found an America so different from the one I grew up in as to be foreign to me. I have allowed myself to crawl into my digital hovel, and sequester myself from the world. If the isolation and alone-ness are doing this to my heart, then surely it is doing it to us all. We’re all isolated now. All digitized. We text message our kid because it’s easier than going upstairs and knocking on her bedroom door. We have verbal fistfights and spew anger and venom because those “people” aren’t really people to us. They’re profiles. Avatars. Facebook accounts. People who would never hate anyone find it easy to hate someone online because to them…they aren’t really real. And then, sadly, that worms its way into the real, tactile world. A President becomes an object of hatred and wrath and the target of assassination threats because he’s no longer flesh and blood. He’s just that guy with the “POTUS” Twitter account. He’s not a dad…a grandad, an American. He’s a series of internet code. I can hate him, or adore him and it means nothing in the real world because he’s not real to me somehow. The same goes for everyone I disagree with. You think the first amendment allows Nazis to march? Then you MUST be a Nazi! Then I hate you!

That’s easy when I’m just a miniscule picture in the corner of a thread on Facebook. It would be harder for you if you sat in my living room and flipped through my photo album and saw the picture of my best friend Rich, when we were just 18 years old and hanging out together at Wildwood NJ. You’d see my handsome friend happens to be black. You’d hear in my voice, the admiration and love I have for him, and you’d never even have to ask me –or yourself- if I was a racist or a Nazi. Because you’d know me…and you’d have your answer.

I decided this week to end my Facebook presence. I may also end my Twitter account. I’m not sure yet. I’m going to spend the time I spent on FB, writing more things like this. Searching for the America I grew up in and chronicling the expedition. I’m going to rekindle the friendships I had as a child and as an adult and maybe add a few faces to that list. I challenge you, gentle reader, to do the same.