Roosevelt School

I always cry at these things. I’m not usually the only one. I’m not even always the only sniffling dad. But normally, not ALL the guys are crying. And almost never the boys.

And while there might have been a dry pair or two—male or female—in the Roosevelt Elementary School multi-use auditorium at yesterday morning’s traditional last-day-of-school assembly, it was mostly not so much.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

I’ve been to a few of these events. Eight of these same ceremonies, to be exact—having had at least one student at Roosevelt every school year since Vincent entered as a kindergartner in the autumn of 2003. Add to these eight the dozens of Veteran’s Day ceremonies, choir concerts, Martin Luther King Day celebrations and play performances, and I’ve shed a proud tear or thousand on school grounds over the years.

But I’d never seen anything like this.

In fairness, it was a particularly touching show, anchored by a 15-minute slideshow lovingly compiled by the three outgoing AmeriCorps teachers, who had been honored earlier in the program with bucketfulls of tokens of appreciation. There was other housekeeping to do—the crowning of the year’s BoxTops collection winners, and the lengthy distribution of the district track meet awards. The slideshow was the straw that broke the kids’ tearducts, but things had been moving in that direction for several segments, ever since the faculty had started getting in on the act.

Roosevelt is the only grammar school my kids have ever attended, so I don’t have anything to compare our experience with. But through informal research & observation, it does not appear to me as though every other K-5 administrator, faculty & staff has the level of enjoyment of-- and dedication to--their crafts as do Steve Morse and his team at Roosevelt.

Steve surely isn’t the only principal ever to have worn a tutu at school on a dare. Band directors shave their heads when their kids take State; coaches paint their faces for big games. There are Great teachers at every school in this country—mentors whose impacts on their students will truly last a lifetime.

But in scanning the faces on the risers as the faculty traded places with the student choir, I was reminded of what an amazing group this was. As they earnestly sang “I Hope  You Dance” as a final gift to their departing 5th graders, I paused on so many of them, fondly recalling the growth my kids had experienced in their care. The nurturing glow & unshakable patience of Karen Ottorholt. The grace & depth of experience of Kim Rutledge. The zeal & curiostiy of Russ Nuckolls, in whose classroom our kids had spent a combined three years. Terri McKee, from whom Edie in particular might have drawn the most confidence of any teacher she’s ever had at any level. But there were some missing faces, too. Gone were Pam and Janice, Tiffany and Donna.

But in pausing to consider each of these and other dedicated lifetime professionals, it occurred to me that it wasn’t just my daughter who was leaving this school—it was me, too! I’d spent a lot of time in this place. I’d ‘been there’ longer than many. I remember the first time I met the incoming 4th grade teacher Megan Thygeson at school—I thought she was a 4th grader! And now there she was on the riser— a faculty & student favorite— her future secure after several 11th hour contract rescues, gently rocking her 6-week-old baby in a front pack as she sang along with the rest of the faculty choir, this beautiful song about life’s opportunities and dancing when those opportunities present themselves.

I hope you dance. When you get the chance to sit it out or dance—I hope you dance…

And in the middle of it all—always in the middle of it—was Steve Morse. A year earlier, I’d looked into the fidgeting eyes of some PTA reg’lars outside the school when they’d asked if I’d heard about Steve. Ruling out what else their worried expressions might have meant in the humid split second that followed, I hastily hoped that he didn’t have cancer, but it sure was cancer. Prostate cancer. An early diagnosis in an otherwise healthy 52-year-old man, but still—cancer. School let out shortly thereafter, and then—nothing. I didn’t feel I knew him well enough to phone. No one appeared to know anything when I bumped into them at the supermarket, and it seemed morbid to chase information. Josie Estrada was officially designated interim principal. It didn’t feel right. We were apprehensive going into the autumn session, and we briefed the kids, who hadn’t heard anything, either. I braced for bad news every day. But none came.

And of course there was Steve on the first day of school, coffee cup in-hand and looking a little ashen, but still greeting everyone just like he had on so many September mornings past. Getting cancer these days doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to die. We baby-boomers have grown up in the age of cancer, and are still adjusting to the miracles modern medicine have laced together where treatment & research are concerned. Of course people are still getting killed to death by cancer—at a rate of 20,000 each day. But the rate of not dying is climbing as well, and it seems like I have been personally touched by more success stories these past couple of years (including my own mother’s) than I have tragedies.

And ten months later still, on the last day of school, here was Steve Morse— looking his old self again. Before opening the teargates, the staff had given the students and parents (AND each other) a hearty laugh with their traditional re-working of a song from the spring musical, this year a drama-within-a-drama entitled Dear Edwina. Edie had shared the title role with her best friend Emma, and the two girls had been further honored by the opportunity to re-write the lyrics of one of the show’s songs “FrankenGuest” into “FrankenBoss” in which Mr. Morse played the role of a tyrannical administrator imposing impossible demands on his already-overworked staff, trying desperately to stay a step ahead of the budget ax and the goons from the State’s testing Gestapo. The skit was hilarious.

FRANKENBOSS—here’s the new math curriculum (throws stack of paper into the air)

FRANKENBOSS—where’d everybody go—to Haggen’s?!

FRANKENBOSS—I AM ALL POWERFUL!!

HE WAS A FRANKENBOSS…

I don’t know how many 5th graders (or  even parents, for that matter) realized how ridiculously funny many of these lines were. The body of the lyrics were written by Edie & Emma and were humorous to everyone; but Steve’s parts definitely came from him personally and were surely an inside joke to a staff that has stood behind him through some hard times and for whom he has stood up as well. There is a great mutual professional admiration amongst these educators, and it shows not only when they are exchanging a wink & a nudge on the choir risers on the last day of school, lampooning a principal gone mad upriver like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now when in fact he’s got the district & state and its “failing schools” list nipping at his shorts day in & day out. This faculty’s respect for each other and ownership of their callings shows every day in the classrooms & hallways of the school. Steve and his teachers genuinely care about each student at Roosevelt, as well as the families that support them. And this was never more apparent than during the stirring “I Hope You Dance,” Steve’s lyric sheet at his side, a proud captain singing the song from memory, his cancer in remission.

And after that, the piling-on of the slideshow. Sheesh… As the houselights came on afterward, I glanced around at a few of the parents standing or sitting nearby and it was clear there’d been an impact made on us. But like I said—that’s nothing new. What I was surprised to see was the knot of 5th graders in the middle of the auditorium clinging to each other through curtains of real tears. I’ve learned this past year that pre-teen girls have an appetite for social drama that often includes crying, but what was happening here as the younger grades peeled away leaving the graduating class to themselves & each other was a genuine display of hammering melancholy that was completely natural and not self-conscious in the slightest. Kids hung on teachers in groups, or hugged deep with classmates they might not previously have been that close with. This was not a cliquish group to begin with, but any subtle subgroups that may have existed seemed utterly dissolved as the 60 students moved around the group, greeting & consoling each other as the emotional pitch of the scene escalated. Noses dripped. Faces blotched. Lips trembled. The confident & matriculated had been thoroughly vaporized by this assembly, and they seemed quite uncertain of what in the world they were supposed to do next.

Eventually, they filed apprehensively out the back door of the building and into the glare of an all-school recess during which the weeping continued and in fact eventually began to spread to the underclassman of the school. Girls—and boys—of all ages bawling under the bittersweet weight of growing up. I’ve been to a lot of these types of events, and as a parent they just destroy me every time. But the kids, I don’t think the significance of these milestones really hits them until much later on, if at all—the privilege of perspective! But I’ve never seen a group of kids so caught in a moment, realizing AT THE TIME how important a move they were making, from being the biggest at a school of little kids to going to a middle school full of teenagers. They didn’t seem scared; they just seemed sad. They seemed sad to be leaving a safe place and heading toward an unknown. They’ll have each other next year, many of them, and some of these kids will be friends their whole lives. Others of them will probably move over the summer, and will never be seen again. What the future holds for any of these kids is completely unknown, and in that respect this is just another step in the great adventure.

 It’s enough to make anyone cry. But smile too…

How to Write Good

So I thought it might motivate me to write more if I attended a writer's conference. Actually, my wife thought it might motivate me to write more if I attended a writer's conference. My analyst agreed. So I took the first step toward attending a writer's conference— that step being thinking about attending a writer's conference.

After that I actually clicked on the link to the writer's conference registration page and read some of the bullet points and other blocks of type, but that got overwhelming rather quickly, so I closed the window and went back to merely thinking about attending a writer's conference. I was relieved when my phone rang, and even though I didn't want to talk with Sandra Salvo about her new listing on 40th Street, I answered the call so I wouldn't have to keep thinking about attending a writer's conference. The conversation was brief, but by then it was almost time for lunch, so I resolved to think more about the writer's conference later in the afternoon.

Next thing I knew it was Sunday.

My wife asked if I'd thought any more about registering for the writer's conference and I said yes, because I literally had thought about it. Then she asked if I had registered for it yet, and I said no but that I planned to. So after checking my email and vacuuming, I checked my email once more and then clicked on the registration page again. It was easier to get through this time because I'd already read most of it, and I easily  found the place where I'd left off a couple of days earlier. I got through it this time and minimized the form.

I found myself back at the thinking about the writer's conference stage. Even though I'd technically completed the reading the registration information phase, I didn't feel like I had the slightest idea what I would do or say at this conference. I opened my email and looked at my phone. I checked the weather.

Breathing a thin sigh I went to get my wallet.

Later that evening when I told my wife I’d registered, she was delighted.  My analyst seemed very encouraged also. Though I know it can't possibly work this way, a certain rogue part of me wants to believe that I can gain this type of enthusiastic approval by merely registering  for enrichment activities without actually engaging in them. Most of the time you can cancel registrations for a small fee, maybe $75. I could register for writer's conferences, business seminars, tax workshops, yoga retreats, and watercolor classes without ever actually having to attend them. Surely the resulting boost to my image would be worth a couple of hundred dollars a quarter! I don't need the skills or the experience— I just want that confirmation code!  Dragging the congratulatory email into a file titled enrichment or growth, I'd feel my confidence swelling and the admiring ( even envious! ) gazes upon me from all directions.

I can't believe no one's ever thought of this. If I was actually planning on attending a writer's conference or a firewalking seminar, this would be a good elevator speech. I’ll think about it…

USPS Dave

This window closed; call it a career. 
My main man Dave from the downtown Bellingham post office clocked out for the last time today, slipping quietly into retirement about an hour after this photo was taken. I don't know how long he'd worked for the USPS. I don't know if he ever walked a route or even what his last name is. Still, he was a person in my neighborhood. 
Dave handled hundreds of pieces of outgoing mail for me these past three years alone. Stack after stack of [sic]s but also the softball to my niece, a Beaver Inn baseball cap to M'ster and the hideous black rubber pompadour wig to my Godson Mark Jeffrey on the occasion of his graduation from high school. Dave never commented on these unwrapped items, instead faithfully advising me of my shipping options and diligently locating a place for the mailing label-- even when the "package" was a cribbage board or an ordinary river rock with someone's name and address written on one side. 
I'm so goddamned angry at my government right now. In times of peace, quasi-government agencies like the postal service might seem more like Big Brother. But this afternoon in my dusty & dated neighborhood post office, the winter afternoon sun shining in through the open door, Dave seemed more like a favorite uncle-- bound for a great adventure. Best wishes in retirement, Dave. You'll be missed... 

Mark Fuckin’ Connolly

This is Mark. He is nice. 

We’ve been friends a long time, nearly 40 years. It doesn’t seem possible, I know. But I’ve done the math more than once, and it always comes out the same. It’s not like we grew up together or something. Our parents weren’t friends. We just know each other from college and apparently that was 40 years ago. 

Mark and I were in the journalism program together at WWU in the mid-1980s. We had both fled the Western Front, rattling down the hall to the decidedly more permissive and stony offices of Klipsun Magazine where we were not only allowed but in fact encouraged to write and publish longer form stories about bathtub ramen, academic freedom and punk rock angst in Anacortes. We had keys to the building and were largely unsupervised. 

It was during this period that Mark introduced me to a drug called Tequila. On a Friday night during the winter of 1985, a group of his friends invited me into their elder’s circle around Mark’s kitchen table in Mud Bay. In the center of the table was a bottle of Two Fingers (when it still came in the black bottle) and a salt shaker. When the tequila was gone, we repaired to the Fairhaven Picture Show to watch Stop Making Sense. I’m quite fond of both Tequila and the Talking Heads to this day, and I have Mark to thank for the introductions. I only wish he'd also taught me to dance like him. 

Mark visited me in New York during the summer of ’86 when I was there on an internship, sleeping on the floor of my tiny dorm room on 5th Avenue. He gimme the cash to give to Monte, but then I had to repay Mark—so I went with Lori to what was called ATM. Eventually I had to pay her back, but not till later. I’d never seen a cash machine before. We didn’t have the internet. 

Mark and I text now, but back in those days we wrote letters. With pens on paper we wrote dozens of letters and licked the stamps with our own tongues. It’s not like I saved them all, but I still have several in a box that once held shoes—postmarks from exotic locations like Taipei, Tukwila, Natick, New York City, Kamakura and of course Bellingham. Handwritten letters, can you imagine? 

We still read and edit each other’s writing. I’ve read a number of Mark’s excellent screenplays and he is currently struggling through my novella. I value his wisdom and insight. We’ve been friends a long time. 

The point of all this is that Mark paid off his house today. We walked into the Fairhaven branch of WECU, sat down with a rep, and he made the final payment of $405. I’ve heard of this happening in mythology, but have never seen it in-person. He could have just sent the money electronically, I guess. But, like sending a letter through the mail, he walked in and paid in-person. I dared him to do it with cash, but it was getting late and we were getting thirsty. The event itself was fairly anti-climactic. I didn’t think a small WECU branch would have a marching band hidden in the vault just waiting for members to come in with their last mortgage payments, but I thought there’d at least be confetti or some balloons. Instead Mark was handed the small white receipt in the picture and a shrug that someone from the real estate division would be in touch on Monday. Maybe Tuesday. We went for beers. 

Now that he owns outright the cabin I sold him on Gooseberry Point 19 years ago, he will retire from his job and book passage to Tokyo where his wife Yoko is waiting patiently. He’ll be back in 90 days to work on a spouse visa while telling himself comedy jokes before bed on Gooseberry Point. But once he gets that visa, he may be out of here for good. 

Safe travels and congratulations, Mark Fuckin’ Connolly!

Party in the Western Mountain Ashes

TODAY is one of my favorite days of the holiday season. It's a day that can't be scheduled with a calendar, or even by the weather. You never know when you get out of bed if it's going to be the day or not, and sometimes until as late as dusk it might seem like just another early December day. But when the birds start to get their drink on, you know it's that day.

It's as if every berry in the neighborhood has suddenly ripened in the exact same instant. Like one minute it's just a regular winter day and then the next minute it's the manic day the birds get drunk. The berries on the Western Ashes out our dining room window are favorites for sure. But the birds are also ravaging the shade trees on the parking strip and beating the bushes across the street-- just bouncing from branch to branch kicking up a king hell racket, half-mad on high-proof fermented juice. If the birds were armed, they would shoot their guns in the air. They don't give a damn...

Late this morning we watched with delight as the Robins and Sparrows raided the last of the Ashes. The Flicker danced atop the crown of the Habsnag, clearly out of his fool bird mind. The little green humming bird zipped here and there doing her usual speed freaky pattern and even the Red-Breasted Sap Sucker showed up to peck fiendishly into the upper reaches of the Douglas Fir as if to say 'there's got to be some more of that shit in here, man! Gimme that!'

The party raged into the afternoon, but eventually the still dried up and the birds crawled away to sleep it off. Tomorrow is New Year's Day for them-- a day to rise late and ice their tiny aching skulls. Tomorrow will be a day of reflection and of listening sheepishly to the stories of the crazy capers they hatched the day before, when they were blind drunk and free. Tomorrow we won't see much of the birds, as they slowly return to their regular bird routines-- just killing time till next year when the leaves have rid the trees and the berries are once again ripe for their fleeting pleasures.

Wooden Nickels

I bought stereo speakers from a guy in a white van long before doing so was a punchline. Talk about your wooden nickels!

To be fair, I think they were pretty good speakers. I couldn’t say for sure, though, because I never plugged them in to my stereo. I couldn’t bring them home because I was supposed to be saving money for college and my mom would have hit the roof.

I drove from the Winchell’s parking lot to the bank and withdrew $200. I had to walk inside a branch of Rainier Bank because the ATM had not been invented yet. This was 1981.

The guy was waiting outside and he took the speakers out of the back of his van and set them in the parking lot. He counted the money like a pro and then without another word, he got back in the white van and drove away.

They were new, still wrapped in plastic. I don’t remember the brand. He said his boss at the stereo store had ordered too many pair and he had to get rid of them so he was selling them for way less than what they cost on the floor. I don’t recall that price. But $200 was a lot of bread in 1981. Of course they were hot, duh.

I put them in the backseat of my ‘71 Impala and drove to Larry’s house. He wasn’t saving money for college and his parents may not even have realized he was still living there at the time. Larry was the youngest of five kids and his folks were pretty much done hitting the roof about much of anything by the time he was in high school. We agreed that he would be merely fostering the speakers, but of course I’d never get any closer to plugging them in to my own stereo than I was right then, leaving Larry’s parents’ house in Redondo.

I used to set my beer down on them whenever I’d go over to Larry’s apartment years later. He had a nice stereo that sounded great with the speakers. They made good end tables for setting your beer on or else the white gnome-shaped ceramic bong that we referred to simply as ‘the gnome.’

We listened to a lot of Rush through those speakers, but Larry & Scott were into reggae too, and also the second Peter Gabriel record with ‘Shock the Monkey’ on it. That song sounded really good coming out of my speakers after an hour with the gnome.

Larry moved a lot. Like pretty much every year he would just move, seemingly for the sake of moving. His job never changed, nor did his roommates. He wasn’t moving up or down, rather he just seemed to be moving. I’d usually help him move and I guess I must have carried those speakers up some flights of south King County apartment stairs a few times while Larry was setting up his waterbed. I don’t think they let you have waterbeds in apartments these days, but this was the 1980s. Ed smoked tobacco inside, too-- it was like the wild west…

I don’t know why I bought the speakers. I obviously got sold hard by some slick fencer, but in my secondary ring of logic I don’t know what the fuck I thought I was going to do with the speakers. I had another year of high school and then planned to do two years at Green River Community College earning an AA before transferring to Western Washington University. I’d be living at home during the first two years and just because I was in college and just because I was an adult and just because I had worked in restaurants since age 15 and had my own money didn’t mean I could buy a $200 set of stereo speakers! It was just out of the question-- an unwritten rule. It was like a household code, and I knew it wasn’t worth the shrill hassle even though my regular speakers were so shitty. Nothing was more important to me at that time in my life than music, yet I suffered with my shitty stereo almost as pre-penance for some future sin I was certain to commit once I finally saved up all my tips and got to college. How perfectly Calvinist.

The home speakers I had in my car were so shitty they made the speakers in my room sound like the speakers at Larry’s. They took up pretty much the whole back window, these shoebox sized grocery store speakers, mounted to the rear deck behind the backseat. I’m sure it’s illegal to block your back window with home stereo speakers these days, just like sleeping in a waterbed on the 2nd floor or smoking inside. But again—a different time…

The top of that back deck was also covered in gold shag carpet just like every other surface in the car that wasn’t a seat or a dashboard or a headliner (though I did try to get it overhead). The carpet had come out of the living room when my mom had new berber installed, and during the 3-night simulcast of the Rolling Stones October run at the Kingdome, I pulled the seats out and laid the shag carpet in the Impala. The car had been sitting in the driveway for a year before I got my license and there were mushrooms growing in it. So I pulled the seats and peeled the stock carpet and scrubbed every inch of the metal chassis with bleach before cutting in the gold shag and bolting the seats back in. I thought I was going to be like a white Cholo, but ’71 was too late a model for hydraulics and my mom wouldn’t let me buy mag wheels or tires with raised white lettering anyway. So I just put the used house carpet in instead.

I didn’t care much for the Rolling Stones at the time and remember thinking that they were so old and irrelevant. Some friends were going to the show and I thought about it for about a minute before deciding to stay home and work on my car. But I did listen to KISW’s simulcast, in the garage with a bottle of bleach and a toothbrush. Of course I was wrong about the Stones and dearly would like to go back and confront that decision again. The Tattoo You tour, fucking god. But even Lester Bangs famously proclaimed them dead after Let it Bleed, so I suppose everyone guesses wrong sometimes…

Larry helped me move a lot, too, once I finally did get that Associate’s degree and transfer to Western-- right on schedule. So even though my moves were of a less recreational variety, they were still moves. And they weren’t two-milers, either-- rather grueling marches up-and-down I5, usually capered in the middle of the night after several hours of load ‘n’ gnome. I had a waterbed, too, and in those days it was still legal to sleep in it on the top floor of a 100-year old 4-story house on a hill in Bellingham. So Larry and I were both moving yearly, breaking down and subsequently re-assembling waterbeds each time.

What I did have that Larry didn’t were dozens of ticket stubs and 2” square pictures of Nikki Sixx and Phil Taylor clipped from pages of Kerrang! magazine taped all over the walls of my room, filling in the gutters between posters and record flats. And sometimes Larry would arrive to load me out and not only would I not have drained my bed yet, but I wouldn’t even have started taking down the wallpaper. Carefully, I would start to peel off the scotchtape loops on the back of the thin paper squares so that I could put the pictures up again in my next room. No wonder it was midnight before we ever got on the road.

Larry drove a little red Mitsubishi pickup. Many years later—at the beginning of a real move, from Washington to California—he would drag the truck all the way from Kirkland to Federal Way, ‘towing’ it behind the U-Haul but with the parking brake on. So, you know, new tires in FW! But long before that, on one of our midnight drives south from Bellingham, my knee itched. Larry and Scott are big guys, each 6’+, so I was always stuck in the middle of the bench seat when the three of us rolled in the Mitsu which was fairly often. We were listening to Peter Tosh and smoking pot like it was going out of style, which, as it turns out it wasn’t-- but we couldn’t have known that at the time. Here we were, these three honkies car-trodding down I5 in the middle of the night with all my stuff in the open bed of the pickup and my right knee is still itching even though I had already scratched it. I’d scratch it and then forget about it but then eventually it would occur to me that it still itched. I started to worry that I had smoked so much ganja that I was becoming paralyzed, so I wiggled my toes and was relieved to find they still worked. I tried scratching my knee again.

“Why do you keep scratching my knee?” Scott laughed, and I looked down to see myself scratching Scott’s left knee. This is something we used to call stoney baloney.

I don’t know if I thought the speakers were a good investment or what. Even if they were a screamin’ deal (I’m sure they weren’t) it wasn’t like they were going to appreciate in value like a traditional investment. Like if I paid $200 for them on a Wednesday afternoon and by the time I got them to Larry’s they were worth $207? If Larry kept them long enough and we didn’t spill too much bongwater on them I’d be able to sell them someday for half-a-million bucks? Unlikely. While it’s true that with the escalating wealth disparity in this country, the ponderously rich are buying wine they don’t intend to drink and comic books they have no interest in reading as ‘investments’ because they’re so fucking bored trying to spend their money conventionally—these speakers would likely never be seen as conventionally collectible.  

Talk about your wooden nickels…

Karate Church

We didn’t really give a fuck about shit in autumn of 1986. We were college students in the pre-internet age. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, but we felt like we were in charge in Bellingham, and in a lot of respects we were.

It was easy to find your way home drunk when you lived at 1111 High Street. Plus right next door was the sub-iconic Karate Church, home to the Bellingham Karate Academy. We named our band Karate Church and tapped the keg. Eight of us lived there (John slept in a walk-in closet) along with a drape-climbing tabby named Fuckstick. We took out what the University called ‘institutional loans’ and bought half-ounces, which we grammed out. It was a good system.

Karate Church had some original tunes but mostly we played junk rock covers and may have been the only band ever to cover Zeppelin and the Misfits equally straight of face. We played ‘Nice Boys’ by Rose Tattoo before Guns ‘n’ Roses, and could go Dead Boys to Beastie Boys in the matter of a half-set.

I invited my future wife to a party at 1111 the first time I ever talked to her. I’d been waiting to meet her for a year already and finally just approached her to tell her who the fuck I was. She knew who I was. She did not attend the party.

Anyway, most of the windows in the house were broken at that party and we were evicted the following week. Incredibly, I was able to find a room in a house up the street and moved my waterbed and all my records up there for the last quarter before I graduated. I was already in Panic and pretty anxious to get to Seattle and start doing some serious headbanging-- but Karate Church was a very pleasurable & socially profitable way to pass the spring of 1987.

Karate Church still stands. I get cottonmouth every time I drive by it, feeling a bit like someone in witness protection. You can’t go back…

Joe the Barker

Just in time for the holidays, this happened. 

A Papa Murphy's pizza restaurant in Bellingham, WA teamed up with a local job placement service to re-assign and elevate a popular disabled neighborhood panhandler, creating a win-win-win situation for the ages. 

Joe B. made a decent supplemental living for years working the southeast corner of James and Alabama Streets in Bellingham's up-and-coming Sunnyland neighborhood with a cardboard sign that read NO DRUGS. In October, thanks to the creativity of a forward-thinking caseworker, Joe was handed a W2 and issued a uniform and a foamcore arrow sign advertising Papa's famous pizza dough  (baked fresh daily). Joe’s territory hadn't changed-- but everything else had.

"It seemed like an obvious application," said Isaac Fornettes, Joe's case manager at Service Alternatives a social service that specializes in job placement for the disabled. "I approached Papa Murphy’s and they were very receptive. The rest was easy." 

Haven Cole, manager of the Papa store in Sunnyland Square hired Joe on the spot, after an hour-long interview.

"Joe had a lot of questions," explained Haven smiling, suggesting Joe was as much interviewing her as the other way around. If she is trying to conceal her pride in having Joe on her staff, she's doing a terrible job of it. With deep, expressive eyebrows, a medusa, and earlobes stretched from tapers, Haven beams when talking about her star barker. “Joe’s got a big heart,” she said, shrugging. “Why wouldn’t you hire him?”

For his part, Joe is very committed to what he’s doing, putting that big heart on display every shift. Throwing himself into his work with seemingly little regard for his rotator cuffs, his curb crackles with energy. Crouching and leaping, Joe cycles through a routine of moves, but favors one he calls steering wheel-- a vigorous side-to-side shimmy guaranteed to grab the attention of even the most distracted driver. Sometimes he dances. Often he waves. Occasionally he sings, changing the words of folk songs to incorporate pizza, signs and cars. But mostly, it’s steering wheel for up to four hours at a time.

“As long as it works,” he says, punctuating the statement with a finger in the air.

Originally from Arizona, Joe moved to Washington State ten years ago in search of better healthcare. He is very open in discussing the automobile accident and the resulting brain injury that has stunted his physical and non-physical development. Joe was two years old at the time of the accident. He’s now 35.

Relaxing in the subsidized apartment where he lives alone, Joe indeed has questions. He wonders why people would be interested in reading his story. The drapes in his  apartment are drawn against the late afternoon sun shining over the traffic on I-5 just outside the window. It is the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and the windchill outside makes it feel like it’s about zero degrees. The heat in the apartment is turned up very high.

To go with his questions, Joe has plenty of answers, and he doesn’t mind being asked stuff. His responses generally start out low, then crescendo in the middle as his engagement in the topic builds, before tapering down and concluding where they started, almost in a whisper. His favorite pizza is the 5-meat, which he takes with Diet Pepsi. The smore dessert pie is pretty good, too, for $5. Plus he gets half-off after his shift, so it’s only $2.50. Even I can easily divide $5 in-half, but Joe is very good with numbers, quickly recounting to the minute his last four shifts and effortlessly calculating their corresponding gross pay. He also has a deep knowledge of the WTA bus system and can tell you most any stop on most any route.

Joe doesn’t drive. He “tricks” traffic by walking King Street under Alabama. He’s well-known in Sunnyland and can be seen on his way to work or the bank. His previous straight job, before he was with Service Alternatives, was filling soap bottles at Brambleberry Soaps, also in Sunnyland. Joe likes his current position better, saying the soap job was “boring, after all.”

And while he admits the Papa Murphy’s job pays better than panhandling (a term he & Isaac both use freely), he does not look back on it as a negative chapter in his life. In fact, he may actually still keep it as a hobby, though not in Bellingham.

“It’s been rewarding to watch this transformation in Joe,” says Isaac. “But he was a bit reluctant at first to give up panhandling. He knows he has a presence in the community now, though, and that he can’t have both.”

Joe explains how he apprenticed under an experienced panhandler who still works Sunset Square. At the time, Joe would wander the sidewalks in front of the smaller shops flanking what was then Cost Cutter. But The Master taught Joe how to design a sign, always being careful to include NO DRUGS and/or ALCOHOL. Joe also learned to take a perch on the corner, where the automobile traffic was. But since the Sunset corners were crowded, Joe struck out on his own, staking his claim on James Street, where he stayed until falling in with Isaac & Haven late this summer.

Next time you pass Joe on the corner give him a wave or a shimmy with your wheel. Better yet, pull in to Papa Murph’s and grab a pie. Tell ‘em Joe sent you!