A few months into the pandemic, I started attending a new OA 12-step meeting for people dealing with compulsive eating problems. It originates from Arizona where my OA sponsor and her husband now live. When I stopped drinking alcoholically, I just transferred my addictive behavior to food, gaining about fifty pounds. Eventually I found my way to OA and now have accumulated 34 years of abstinence around food. I’ve gone to the same meeting in my home town all that time and was wanting a second meeting where there might be people with as much or more abstinence than I have. My sponsor assured me I’d be welcome at her AZ meeting since they were meeting via Zoom because of the pandemic. So for the past six or seven months, I’ve been a faithful face in my little rectangle on Saturday mornings.

As is true at most 12-step meetings, someone reads the same words each week before we share individually. In one of these template moments, I was taken aback my first time because I heard a new sentence. We are being reminded about not talking too long when we speak, and about not giving “advice” to anyone but just to listen. That part was familiar but then the person reading said “If you need to talk about a food issue, remember to speak from within the solution and not from within the problem.” That caught my attention immediately so I wrote it down to ponder later. The more I thought about what that statement really means, the clearer I became that this group accented the fact that we have a program structured around tools that have proven through many years to help any one who seriously uses them. As I listened to women speaking about their struggles with food issues, I could tell that most of their “share time” was devoted to what they were doing to work their way out of the struggle and get back to sanity around what we were eating. So I changed how I contributed and even have seen a positive carry over into other facets of my life.

All this story is backdrop for what I want to share about my responses to watching “Nomadland” recently. Like many others, I was drawn in immediately because of Frances McDormand’s amazing presence. So much of this movie depends on non-verbal expressions and body language–things McDormand employs with tremendous skill and discipline, I think. Once I’d seen the movie and talked about it with a friend with whom I watched it, however, I kept thinking of the group of people who played themselves and actually live a nomadic life style. That meant I paid particular attention to Bob Mills, the older man who has helped formulate communities of individuals who just can’t manage living under roofs, who “have to depart” as we are told at the end of the film. Given the fact that many scenes show Fern’s listening to another of these individuals recount her or his story. Those recitals are often about losses or other hard circumstances faced by the speaker. Fern mostly just listens, and the more I thought about it, the story tellers did not cast themselves as hopeless victims who blame parents or some government for what has happened to them. But they also are not “resigned” or even brow-beaten by life’s offerings. I wouldn’t say they had “acceptance,” because often that involves stopping hoping for miracles–or at least positive surprises. As my friend and I kept sharing on days following our seeing the movie, I had an epiphany–the people speaking for themselves were “speaking from within the solution and not from within the problem.”

Indeed, Bob tells Fern this in his own words near the end of the film. And those words now are deepening my own understanding of the OA sentence. I believe that the people in his communities are making strenuous efforts to LIVE within the solution, not just to speak from within it. So whatever hard knocks come at them, they rely on their “tools” for meeting life on life’s terms as best as they can. It may not look heroic or even successful by our world’s standards, but the real people and the character of Fern have a composure and perhaps even a grace that is not that different from what I work to maintain around my relationship with food. Their tools and mine help us avoid despair and self-pity and that is a blessing.

For two whole days, the managers from the House of Representatives shaped in meticulous and unavoidable detail exactly how the former president is responsible for the violent and lawless mob’s insurrection as they stormed the Capitol building on January 6th.  Each speaker was responsible for another facet of this monumental assemblage of facts, video both seen and previously unseen, direct quotations from the former president.  What impressed me as much as the content was the utter seriousness with which these women and men were taking their assignment.  I was sure that not only they themselves had devoted countless hours to finding just the right balance between outrage and reasoned argument, but each of their staffs had been instructed to spare no detail that might bolster the general argument.  

Watching the faces especially of some Republican Senators who listened attentively, especially on the first day, I felt sure that many of them would have voted to convict had the vote been secret.  But it was not secret, so in the end only seven of those Senators stood on principle, followed their oath to obey our Constitution, and risked serious backlash from many in their own party.  News in the days following the vote to acquit tell us that is precisely what is happening to the honorable seven–they are being censured by state party officials and may be subjected to more tangible rebuffs or even threats in coming weeks and months.

The managers from the House used every minute allotted to them because they felt the gravity of what they were being asked to do for our country as it veers dangerously off course and away from even the vestiges of democratic principles and behaviors.  Then day three dawned and it was time for the former president’s defense attorneys to have equal time to present their case for acquitting their client who refused to appear and give direct testimony about his claimed innocence.  Imagine my surprise when, driving in my car to the grocery store mid-afternoon after the defense had begun at noon, I heard that it was over!  They had spoken for less than three hours.

As I tried to take in this surprising brevity, two names kept entering my mind–Elizabeth Bennet, a main character in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice and Hannah Arendt, author of The Banality of Evil, her reflections on attending the trial of a former Nazi.  Anyone who has read Austen’s novel or seen a movie version of the story will remember that Mrs. Bennet could trivialize the most serious subject matter or moment in her own life or that of her daughters.  Her only goal is to marry them off suitably, so she brushes facts away as insignificant pests that slow her down in reaching her goal.  She also favored garden parties or strolls along the seashore to a serious conversation about the complexities of human existence.  As for Arendt, she is frightened and appalled by her realization that the Nazi on trial was not a looming monstrous figure but rather a simple man who thought he was just doing his job.  To have to admit that evil could be purveyed by so banal an actor forced her to understand how a group of people could come to idolize a figure as evil as Adolph Hitler.

By refusing to engage seriously in the second impeachment trial of our make-believe president, those lawyers insulted all of us who were stunned by what we saw unfolding before our eyes on January 6th.  They completely brushed off the whole affair, speaking just a little while before resuming their everyday lives.  Maybe they had a late afternoon golf match with fellow lawyers or a dinner date for which they needed to hurry home and change into something appropriate to the occasion.  What their so short argument before our Senators told me was they knew the outcome before they said a single word, so why “waste” words on so insignificant a case.  Not only did their shameful behavior let them thumb their respective legal noses over something many of us consider one of the most serious political subjects–whether to impeach an elected president of the country–but it also confirmed a boast that person made while campaigning for the presidency.  Yes, I refer to his saying “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody without losing any voters”–a comment worthy of Elizabeth Bennet and surely one that would strike fear in the heart of Hannah Arendt.

Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying to Doctor Watson that someone had “vanished without a trace.”  This phrase came to me about a week ago as I was walking my usual early morning route in my neighborhood.  That route takes me to a Mall that extends for about five blocks and is where a yearly art fair usually installs white tents inside which artists set up and hawk their creative wares in August.  Of course that event was cancelled this year because of the pandemic.  Instead, in late spring, one morning I noted four or five tents set up and knew instantly that they belonged to homeless people.  Within days, our park board had installed a Portapotty so people had a place to eliminate.,  Within a week or so, those initial tents grew into more than twenty, spread all down the narrow grassy area across from the Mall proper.  My walk had always included going up one side road to the “U” at the top of the area and then down on the other side that ran alongside several old brick apartment buildings.  As the homeless encampment grew, I shortened my walk and took it on the grassy Mall area, though I never felt in any danger.  Usually I was there before any of the tent dwellers was awake; if someone was already out in front of their quarters, we spoke but did not have conversations.  

As the size of the settlement increased, I noted that many were not living in “tents,” but had thrown together several large plastic sheets, often full of rips and holes, secured loosely to stakes or poles.  Some of these structures sagged on a good day and, in early October when we had a very unexpected heavy wet snow event, collapsed into themselves from the sheer weight of wet stuff.  That morning and for several more until sun melted the snow and dried the plastic sheeting, I wondered how those inside were managing since I felt pretty sure nothing so thrown together could be water-proof. Since I walked past the encampment five mornings a week, I noted the changing nature of each “tent” and had a range of feelings.  The longer each person or couple stayed there, the more odds and ends began to be outside the pretend sleeping/living area.  One spot had set up a dead chrysanthemum clearly retrieved from someone’s alley where it had been taken because it was no longer “fit” to adorn a front porch or patio.  Several sites came to include grocery store push carts full of clothes or papers or more pieces of plastic, perhaps waiting to be used when other strips played out..  Initially I thought how “messy” the various sites were becoming, wondering why anyone would retrieve a dead flower and carry it blocks to be put outside the flimsiest of shelters.  That privileged reaction morphed into one perhaps closer to reality:  I began to feel that if I were homeless and forced to try and make shelter outside, then middle-class ideas of “neatness” couldn’t be applied. to me  To such a person, a faded yellow plant might raise their frayed spirits more than I could possibly comprehend. So I began to let go of my judgmental reactions and just be glad the person or people inside that particular flimsy place had found anything to give color or life to their tiny bit of grassland that is all my super wealthy neighbor could offer or allow them.

As fall extended itself, I began to wonder when the city would ask or force these homeless individuals–mostly black–to  “vacate the premises,” another often-used phrase when facing the realities of homelessness in this country.  At first, I noticed that the man who lived  at the end of the string of plastic houses was out one morning burning trash in front of his dwelling.  Next morning, he was gone, though lots of bits and pieces of his life accumulated over about three months were visible in the grass.  I wondered where he might have gone and hoped that perhaps some agency had found him better accommodations even as I suspected that were not the case.  In the course of the next week or so, about a third of those living between him and the original group of tents cleared out as well and I kept wondering where they might be on a given early morning as I walked by the mostly empty space where they’d made the best places to “live” as they could.  Then, after noting one morning that there were now only about seven or eight remaining tents, I came to the Mall, looked to my left to see how things were going, and found not a single sign that anyone had ever been there.   Not only were the actuall people gone but the park board had gotten trash trucks to scoop up every shard of their belonging.  Every large black or blue trash bin had been emptied, tidied on the outside, and replaced where it had “belonged” before the encampment happened.  Anyone who had not seen this make-shift community as I had done would have no idea it had ever existed.  To them, indeed, the women and men who had lived there had “vanished without a trace.”  But I had seen them, morning after morning, for about eight months.  They came to be part of my day in a strange and disconnected way.  And now, when I walk further up the green meridian and look at bare ground where they slept and ate and talked and maybe even made love or argued or hurt each other, questions linger:  Why didn’t I give them money or bring an old blanket as air got colder or leave food from the nearby grocery store where I shop often?  Why didn’t I ever say more than “Hello” or “Good morning” to someone just up from their hard “bed”?  And, most important of all, “Where are they now?”

Their “trace” is in my memory, nagging at me every time I walk past the Mall, haunting me until I find an action I can engage in that may help some other homeless person trying to make a life out of whatever fragments s/he can salvage from the largesse all around them.