Street Corners

Fifth and Wilson, Santa Rosa

My attempts to learn something about my newish camera have been curtailed by the fact that Blake and Rudy were here for awhile yesterday, and Blake ate the users' manual, so I decided to try a street corner shot with my phone.

The  building on the left is the Hotel La Rose which I passed this morning as I walked from Flying Goat Coffee to Western Farm Supply to get Ozzie some glucosamine. (It's right next to the pig dewormer and the bag balm for cows.) Many of  the buildings in Railroad Square were built by Italian immigrants at the turn of the century out of local basalt stone. Flying Goat Coffee is in another hotel building across the way, which has been repurposed by a guy known only to me as Larry,, although we have had many a conversation about the history and character of the town. He has an office upstairs.

The park on the right is where I met Chris, a homeless man who likes to read and talk about books. I met him here a couple of years ago when I discovered Aztek Mochas at Flying Goat, but with the opening of the new SMART train, the park has been cleared of all the people who have no place else to go, including Chris. The last time I spoke to him, Catholic Charities was trying to help him find some kind of shelter, but couldn't really help him until he solved other problems which involved Social Security and his health. This seems backward to me. If you have no place to go, how do you solve all your myriad other problems  which are directly related to having no place to go? It's a total Catch22 situation. I have been carrying around a growing stack of New York Times magazines which I collect for in the back of the car for Chris in case I see him again. This morning I threw them all in the trash. 

After a week of lovely warm weather, today, it is overcast, cold and a bit dismal, and  the AC guy,  came back to renegotiate. He agreed that the one that died  was really too big for the house and changed the order to one that is smaller and costs half as much. He told us that his wife just had twins. He probably can't even remember the last time he got any sleep, much less what size air conditioner we should have.