It's crowded, but at least I'm not on the street...

I've been meaning to keep the Chronicle up to date ever since I moved out of my old 12th Street apartment, but it's been a little difficult to do it for a couple of reasons - first, the initial week or two afterward was so hectic and chaotic that I could barely think straight. Then, of course, there's the issue of privacy in a large studio apartment with three people and two cats living in it... and a computer that's been quirky about when it allows us to connect to the internet (how many of you are stuck dealing with Windows Vista and loathe it as much as I do? I can't be the only one who thinks it's the worst operating system on the market - so many gremlins and bugs it's beyond belief and almost makes me wish we could just go back to the old DOS system where if you hit a problem and were patient enough, you could tweak the code a bit or simply backup your data, reformat and wipe the disk, and reinstall DOS and be on your merry way - yeah, it was slow, and I recall several LONG weekends spent doing that, but at least you could be assured that once completed, it would be quite a while before you'd need to do it again and you might actually gain some space afterwards).

I've spent several weeks now living with my soon-to-be-ex and son in a studio. The cats seem to be totally thrilled with the arrangement; they have free access to all sorts of meat products now that I rarely had in my house, and they've come to expect fragments of kielbasa as a supplement to the usual cans of cat food. The tomcat has started to hang out ON the table, which was never permitted in my house - he knew better. Although my ex howls about fur and paws that have been in the litter box in close proximity to food, I have to say I doubt the tomcat would be so bold if somehow he didn't sense that the rules around here are something along the lines of Wild West Saloon style. The ex and the son are the gunslingers dealing cards and ordering sarsaparilla and whiskey near the bar, and I'm the piano player hiding in the back trying to stay out of the main line of action. He may also sense that critters with a y chromosome are in the dominant majority here. Who knows.

Both of them have had a running cold for weeks now. I'm the germaphobe in the family, especially since I'm the one who had an incredibly bad winter two years ago when I caught bronchitis from my son, who was in first grade at the time (a particularly germ-ridden year for most kids) that I couldn't shake for 8 or 9 months. It drove me to seek assistance from a particularly horrendous pulmonary specialist, whose prescriptions and diagnoses were almost worse than the bug itself - I had every side effect known, and ended up spending countless hours in the emergency room at Methodist Hospital (not a place you want to go unless you're doing research on first-hand experiences of Dante's Inferno). When I had the nice, large apartment of my own, it became customary at the first signs of a particularly bad bug to set my son up in his room with massive quantities of orange juice, drawing materials, a giant box of tissues, and kids' stories on tape from the library until he seemed like he was out of the woods, and cross my fingers. There's no room to do that here; the kid and the ex have been running at the nose and coughing like tuberculars for weeks, and yesterday, I collapsed for a three hour nap at around noon - also difficult in a small space, but I just couldn't shake the awful sinking feeling of being in the grip of a nasty flu. I woke up dizzy and spaced out this morning, realizing also that my doctor in the Slope was a good 30 minute bus trip away should I decide to brave the elements and beg for a walk-in appointment - and there was a half hour panic attack this morning after the ex and the kid left for school and work when I realized that I was really on my own for the duration of the day - far from my doctor, completely out-of-the-question too far from any of my old friends and neighbors to ask for help should I continue to feel dizzy and out of it - and I'm the designated picker-upper of the kid at the end of the day, and the trip from Kensington to Red Hook and back seemed especially brutal in sub-freezing weather and a nasty batch of crud sitting in my chest and sinuses. The trip takes an hour each way, barring any unforeseen hangups like I encountered a week and a half ago on a Friday night, when there were signal problems on the F that knocked it completely out of service northbound at Church Avenue. Fortunately, when I got up to street level, I discovered that the 67 bus now runs substantially further south than I thought it did, and I was able to get a shop keeper in a local corner store to let me use his phone to call my son's after school program to let them know about the delay and jump on a very crowded bus.

It's bleak down here in Kensington. I hate the longer walk to the F train to the point that I often find myself paying an extra fare to take the 68 bus along Coney Island Avenue up to Bartel Pritchard Square, then transferring to the F at 15th Street and continuing on from there. The streets are dead quiet all day and all night; there are only a few signs of life here for hours, and run more to local squirrels and birds than humans. I'm not used to this; it's what I left Queens years ago to get away from - even Flatbush has more life. I feel isolated and cut off, and every time I come through Park Slope on my way to retrieve my son from his after school program, I find myself missing Park Slope and my old life even more painfully than I ever thought I would. I walk down familiar streets there now feeling like an outsider rather than a member of the community and a part of its lively fabric.

I GUESS YOU HAVE TO BE REALLY "OUT" WITH YOUR HOMELESSNESS TO GET PAID ATTENTION TO...

Not to sound heartless, but I wonder, after reading this article, whether there aren't a lot of less obvious homeless people around the Slope area who are having a heck of a time getting services because they don't have the same kind of "high profile" as the fellows mentioned in this piece. I also wonder whether these guys are getting services offered them now because they're seen as public nuisances to be gotten rid of quickly because a few well-placed folks are getting annoyed with them.

Either way, it's really cold out there tonight... nobody should have to be homeless during the winter of all seasons.




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December 1, 2007 / News / The Stoop / Park Slope
Pastor and rabbi unite to help Slope homeless
By Dana Rubinstein
The Brooklyn Paper
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The Brooklyn Paper / Nicole Braun
Rev. Daniel Meeter (left) and Rabbi Andy Bachman discuss ways to help the homeless, several of whom spent the summer sleeping at Meeter’s Old First Reform Church.

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The three homeless men who sparked a flurry of soul searching in Park Slope — and the ire of a local pastor — after refusing to moderate their drinking and noise-making have abandoned their long-time hangout on the steps of the Old First Reformed Church, but they have left a legacy behind.

Rev. Daniel Meeter, Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim, and the Park Slope Civic Council have formed the “Park Slope Coalition for the Homeless,” which will be devoted to improving the well-being of the dozens of homeless who flock to the Slope for its wealth of, well, wealth.

The incipient group was borne from a Nov. 20 meeting with the city’s Department of Homeless Services.

The next day, Bachman posted the Coalition’s four basic principles on his blog, www.andybachman.com: “Acknowledge with dignity those who are homeless. … Work for their dignity and safety. Connect them to the variety of homeless services in the city. Support the provision of services to these people.”

It’s not as though Meeter hadn’t been trying to do just that.

As The Brooklyn Paper reported last month, three men had taken up residency on the steps of the Old First Church this summer: Robert Royster, who’d been an on-and-off visitor for years, Will Franklin, who drank on the stoop yet slept elsewhere, and Frank Silano.

Meeter first tried to help, getting Franklin a job at a local Key Food — a job he soon lost. The pastor also gave the men leftover food and offered to help them get treatment. His deacon knitted them scarves.

But nothing helped. After the men “started urinating and losing self-control,” Meeter said he asked them to leave.

“There was a week in July when I said, ‘Hey guys, it’s over,’ and I started throwing their stuff out and chasing them away. Problem was, they’d come back — and now they were hostile.”

But Meeter said the final kicker was Sunday, Oct. 21, when he discovered that the men had hidden a steel bar behind the church wall.

“I saw the steel bar as a weapon. It was all beyond tolerance,” said Meeter.

After Meeter wrote about the situation on his blog, www.oldfirst.blogspot.com, the story became the talk of Park Slope, with plenty of people defending Meeter’s right to get frustrated by the homeless men on his doorstep, but others questioned the pastor’s inability to turn the other cheek.

“I thought that the church was about the awesome, unrelenting, compassionate, power of God,” wrote one person on Meeter’s blog. “I guess…the world is changing.”

Later, Bachman wrote to Meeter and, with the help of the Park Slope Civic Council, set up a meeting with the city to create the new organization.

It’s already bearing fruit, Meeter said.

“I saw Robert Royster walking up Carroll Street,” Meeter said. “I told him, ‘Robert, I’m going to call Common Ground [a homeless services organization], and they’d like to come and meet with you to determine what services they can provide.’ We met him outside of Key Food. He’s now in their system for medical care and permanent housing.

“Today, I talked to another homeless guy I know near the Q train on Flatbush Avenue.”

Not bad for the organization’s first week. Not that the rabbi hasn’t been pulling his weight, too. On his blog, Bachman wrote about his efforts to help a “chronically homeless man,” prompting responses ranging from congratulatory to skeptical.

“I admire everyone’s optimism in this effort, but know many social workers and others in this community [who] have personally made intense efforts to connect various homeless individuals with appropriate services over the years and have been rebuffed,” wrote a woman named Janet.

Be that as it may, Meeter and company are determined to try. It’s not as though the homeless problem is going away anytime soon.

“There’s been a homeless problem in Park Slope for decades, and we expect it to continue for as long as there is wealth here and relative safety,” said Meeter. “Today, I encountered four homeless people just between the Q train on Flatbush and the church.”


©2007 The Brooklyn Paper


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I guess that to receive help in avoiding becoming homeless (or help once you actually become homeless) - or even get NOTICED as needing help, you really have to act out in public... atrracting all sorts of attention to yourself.

The article talks about organizations and social worker types who offer help to people facing this sort of crisis, and yet, if you just happeh to be a college-educated white women who's over 45 with a small child, the organizations and social workers don't seem to think you need help as badly - in spite of being totally broke, in spite of needing the help just as badly as a bunch of guys who hang out on a very busy street in a very well off part of Brooklyn.

Oh well. HRA and Common Ground and a whole raft of other charities, social service agencies, etc., certainly haven't been at all helpful to me when I've actively reached out and requested any sort of help - and I've been very strenuously and actively jobhunting for over a year (and I have quite a few qualifications that would work in several types of jobs, and I don't mind taking "survival" jobs.

Take a look at what I've been going through:
http://homelesschronicle.blogspot.com/
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