42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

I still have flashes of vague unreality. Can I really be here? Did I really move away from everything I’ve known?
Is the snow I see on the ground a fall of blossom petals?

It was so unreal to me at one point that I had this paranoid fear that nobody would believe I moved. It was, after all, something I’ve never been known to do before. Take such a big chance. To move away from my family. From a job that was at least secure. From the midwest, from the snow. From the beautiful world around me, that I always thought was enough.
Perhaps it was all a big game of make-believe. Let’s see how long I can get away with it. I’ve got a new phone number, but that’s not enough. Neither are the pictures I’ve taken, nor the visits with two sets of friends. Perhaps I’m holed away somewhere in disgrace, writing misleading e-mails and blog entries.
Again, I said I’m paranoid. Maybe it’s my own disconnect with reality that leads me to the paranoia.
I get a flash of it still. I’m driving in the warm March afternoon, windows rolled down, passing palm trees.
Life here is normal after all. It’s just a bit warmer.
I’m navigating a freeway system that once seemed complicated quite easily now.
Then I drive along a road without the benefits of pretty landscaping. It’s about as far from pretty as you can get. Very abandoned industrial. People straggle along on foot. I wonder if they’re getting off school, but they’re not all children.
I notice they all head in one direction, and then I happen along a long row of sheds that are shelters for homeless. A sign about Jesus sits atop a main building. There are others, and I don’t know if they’re all part of the same organization, or if this is a homeless row.
I can’t understand what it’s like to be homeless. I only know it makes me depressed and frustrated.
It also brings me a little closer to reality, to earth. There’s no room for poverty in some elaborate fantasy. There’s no sad gathering of belongings piled under an overpass. No woman crouched down so the store owner won’t see her, peddling flowers at a corner. No young man, doing the same at a drug store, with nodding head dogs, popping up from behind a car whenever someone comes out.
No shopping carts except in grocery stores.
No man wandering around a shopping center, looking grizzled, like he hasn’t seen a bath in a while, but still trying to keep his dignity. Wearing a backpack, another sign on an adult that he might carry his possessions with him. No nearby cart filled with belongings.
I feel hardened, and disconnected from my true self when I turn away from yet another man at a stoplight, holding a cardboard sign that says I’m homeless, I’m a homeless veteran… Can you help out? God bless.
I wonder what spurs such faith in people.
I guess I’m thankful to be here, but sad to be confronted with poverty every day. I knew this when I was coming here.
Heather says it’s a question of safety. Once, she discovered someone had been looking in my car, wiping condensation off the window, after she turned someone down at night.
Maybe this is part of the disconnect too.
I come from a small town, ultimately. I spent the last several years working in a small city, but I still lived in a small town. I lived in an encapulated world where I did my job, where I didn’t see ugly things touch the world, unless it was in the paper. I was free to judge from a distance.
Ugly things are mixed in with the beautiful here. I guess it helps me come back to earth.
I didn’t expect a paradise when I came here. I knew this was not the “sexy” part of California. I knew that this was an economically depressed area.
So it’s hard to see the rich, new development end of town segregated from the poor end. Where people sell flowers on their front lawn on Valentine’s day, trying to make a couple extra bucks. Where some guy in my neigbhorhood rides around a push-pedal cart selling cotton candy, even in the middle of the rainy winter.
Where people rummage around in the trash.
You can probably go for weeks without seeing an abandoned cart on the nice end of town. You can probably commute to your job without seeing much of the ugliness. If you work downtown, you can just attribute it to a typical downtown. Never mind that it’s most of the town.
We see what we want to see. I see a reality that is both grim and beautiful. I’m more confident that I’m here, that this isn’t some elaborate fantasy of mine.
If only because in my dreams, everyone is well-fed, housed, and happy.