Mary's 16th birthday cake, May 26,2004-- Hiei from YuYuHakasho drawn by Mary, of course |
Marina, 10, July 09, 2004. |
Deanne and Mary, 16, her 16th birthday. The red inflammation on her cheeks came after she used an over-the-counter product for acne called Oxyl made of benzyl peroxide. It lasted 60 days. We couldn't get the kids back on Medicaid -- because our electric was off those 60 days, we lived at others' and in a tent and in our van . I somehow lost the papers saying I owned my house. No Medicaid for them. Other times I had no gas money to get to the place. No one sticks around, believe it or not--you can have 6 friends show up at the hospital when you have cardiac arrest but 6 years later there's no one hanging around still saying f you need a ride somewhere, call. They go through a year, 2 , even 3 of your abject poverty with you and then it is too depressing for even the hardiest. And I can't befriend the kids' new friends' parents because the kids don't want them to see how poor we are. The kids were right--2 parents who did see our house, the kids never called my kids again. (See, they go to schools 2 hours from home.) Never let them smell your hunger, the kids' dad used to say, or they'll run. |
Mike Werner,grad, Waterford Township High School, 1969. He's more or less the girl's uncle, having lived with my twin sister 33 years, but he's been living in homeless shelters for over a year now. When they lost their home,she went to Mom and Dad. He had no relatives to go to. In the process of getting around on foot he lost the tibia of his left leg. Now he's disabled from being homeless. I smelled his hunger and ran. That's why I put him here. When I was alright and he was a homeless bum in the same clothes all the time I made fun of him, didn't answer the door to him, made Debbie keep him in her car if I had friends over---my parents still won't let him in their house---I learned, though. I came to. One day he said to me "It's time you started treating me like a human being!" Dan said "You should act like one then"! But a day later Mike was in a brain-dead state in a hospital and 2 months later he still did not recognize me or move or talk other than babble and I feared he was gone forever and I felt so so so bad for my part and I asked Father Nick Mormando of theBronx who is holy to pray for him and Mike came back. I mean all of him, he can tell you where Ceylon was and who 's country it was and who nero was and when the Boston tea Party was, and why, and reads a novel a day and has stories about the punks he grew up with and always has a story-- how the crack heads use the glass stems of single corsages , what moonshiners did during prohibition , how 3 teens ate poisonous mushrooms thinking they'd get high and one needed a new liver ...and a dying religous lady specified he get her liver even though eveyone told her don't, he brought it on himself, help an innocent victim.. she said he was too young to die and he got her liver and lived. Mike taught me what Jesus is really like. Now I am a better jesus. Now when I see "homeless" I know they are not weird but Mike. |
My twin, Debbie , July 2004--she weighs 35 pounds more than I --I guess a lot is asceties, as she is dying of liver failure and cirrhosis although she never drank once in her life. |
This is my angel. While my teen puts me down because with my congestive heart failure at its end stage I have lost my ability to sing pure notes (boy have I ), my little girl worries about me and looks out for me always. We have shared a bed and room her entire life due to circumstances beyond our control. I wish and pray daily she could have a normal life. |
Make Your Life Living Until You Get To Live Again |
There are viewpoints and studies and personal memoirs of the poor of America in the 2000s. They are not colorful in the sense of the westward ho families dumping the heirloom piano out of the covered wagon so the horses could get across a ford. Or the widow making life work for her 8 children in the sod house on the prairie. Or the immigrant Italian family living in a rough Bronx neighborhood the first generation. No, our family did all that. The descendants dispersed around the country with nice homes and good work ethics. One's a real estate lawyer. One founded a bank.But my unexpected fatal illness in my prime left us in poverty and clinging to a home we lose in 6 months for unpaid 2002 property taxes. And no way to save for them. We live off $900 a month , with the electric bill $400 a month and the water bill close to $100 and the phone and internet $70 and the gas $30. That leaves $100 a month per child and for mom ,each, to eat, get toilet paper and laundry soap and washers and dryers at the laundrymat and clothes and dog food for our only protection in this bad neighborhood , and there's never any chance of new bath towels (8 years) bedsheets (6 years) let alone repairs, our oven and stove have not worked in 4 years--- the kids outgrow their clothes a lot--- I have the same clothes I had 7 years ago, 10 years ago, and the same hair, never permed or cut or trimmed.... Mary got only a couple of presents. But we got a cake she could decorate, and she enjoyed having her "Hiei Birthday Cake." It is assumed the contemporary poor have large families and lots of like neighbors to support them. We are all alone. America has just tossed us out. My primary dropped all Medicaid patients July 1 saying he hadn't been paid by Medicaid in over a year, so I picked a new one. Medicaid took his name and laughed when I said don't you want his address and said they already knew it. The next week I couldn't see him because I hadn't picked one in time they said, saying they had no record I picked him. "It wasn't filed." I cannot see a doctor til August now, any, as my primary has to approve of my others. Meanwhile my daughters don't want their friends to know how poor they are so hide it. Have no one over. It is so lonely here and awful. Weevils in every food we get from a church or food pantry. People acting as if poverty is our defect, not an honor we bear well for all the grief it has caused us. |
Please Lord hear my plea Please help us .Amen For Mike, a home, and help with meals and cleaning. For debbie, peace as she dies , as she is alwys anxious and upset. me, peace and a happier teen. Mary, a normal life as she calls it but it is really not so normal, just in the U.S., and just in the last 40 years. For Marina, her own bedroom , and neighbors so the ads she is making on her computer to babysit aren't just jokes. I remember when Mary was 10, this same house. She made signs saying "Girls Club..all girls invited!" And "Haunted House -- 5 cents" but nobody called or knocked. There are no kids living within walking range in all directions. Still none,when Marina is 10. No kids to babysit. No normal life they saw so much of on the Disney Channel , neighborhoods like Lizzie McGuire's and every other show on, even 7th Heaven..every kid has a neighbor kid! My kids are like unusually deprived! I hate it ! I am so friggin sick of this place I am prisoner in and the grunts of the guy on oxygen on my couch and the pimps whistling to their hookers from my fence corner where they peep around so cops don't see them when they look down our street as they drive by on the main hooker drag---Out! Out! OUT! OUT! Get me out! I'll go nuts! We have to get out! I can't teach my kids how to bake, broil, fry, launder anything , select things to purchase, I can't teach them anything I know ! It is all useless we can't cook bake launder purchase--- we are just waiting for them to turn 18 leave and have a fucking oven stove frypan washing machine they can learn how to friggin use! it's unbearable! They will hate me like the teen does now, blame me for living longer than I was suposed to ! Listen United States the United States prohibits me from earning extra income to get an oven, fix my washer, etc. or I lose my medical! And that much income from Social security. Which could make sense if Social security wasn't just enuf to pay utilities and eat, and losing it mean I'd have to use the roof-repair or oven-purchase money to eat and pay bills so that I would still not be able to get an oven or a washer. They take the money out of my social security AND my Medicaid, costing me my life (2 months of my heart meds: when all the extra money I just made went to my electric, food, phone, and water?) SO I'd not only not get the oven or roof repairs, I'd also lose 2 months of medication just for trying, and in that, lose my life, as my blood pressure shot sky high suddenly after 10 years of being 90 over 50. It's not like i'm a bum so that's why we suffer. I'd love to earn the money to give my girls a life. The won't let me . They'll take away my heart transplant. I'll die. Please Lord hear my plea Please help us .Amen Mike has to fight to keep these homeless places he gets placed in. He has to apply for social security disability over and over to proove he's trying. See doctors all the time with a bum leg and no car. And still he hasn't had a drink of alcohol in 10 months--since right before he went in the hospital. He's not saying anything but he's doing it. He's finally quit. Lost his leg though, it took, but it took. A homeless man wanting to live with his girlfriend again but realizing he can't help her around the house like he used to, can't climb a ladder or do much with one of the two bones of his calf missing,so he's trying to tolerate being alone all day every day and lonely and they had to give up their beautiful beloved black lab when they became homeless and his whole world just caved in. He lost all his belongings including photos of his boyhood fishing and his upper-middle-class lakefront house , his late parents and sister who died at 14 (he was 17) of Hodgekin's Disease.He's just trying to keep his room at this shelter for disabled men. The other men there are all zombies who don't talk to each other.Mike is so scared he's going to go out on the streets again he cries and wishes he were dead.The cruel lady who runs his shelter says things to him as he's leaving with Debbie to come see us like "I hope you packed you bags" and he thinks it means he's kicked out. She's really nasty to do that to a confused person. See the lady has been telling Mike he's out of there for weeks, says the govt hasn't paid his bill. The county gave Debbie and Mike a receipt showing they paid it 2 days before. The lady doesn't know they know. She's wicked. Trying to drive Mike to drink or suicide like that . Why do such toxic people pick careers with such needy people and then pick on them ? Please Lord hear my plea Please help us .Amen I just want my kids to be as normal as I was at their age. Electric. Water. telephone. Books. Tv. School. Babysitting. Neighborhood kids to ride bikes to or with. No hookers in my driveway . A happy teen who loves herself not hates herself because shes' had no water 10 months followed by no electric 2 and now they want to cut the electric off again this month already ; they let Dan put it in his name and then stuck my bill on his after telling him he could open an account . and they'd bill me for my $1000 bill. (2 months' electric.) They lied. They stuck my bill on his so they can cut it off again in one month. They directly lie by telling him he could open a new account and not be responsible for my previous, already-closed out account. He moved in and he's on oxygen and then they hit him with his first electic bill , due July 19 ,of over $1200. Liars. Please Lord hear my plea Please help us .Amen Please Lord hear my plea Please help us .Amen Please Lord hear my plea Please help us .Amen Please Lord hear my plea Please help us .Amen |
