Summer People
The summer people are out.
These are unhoused, probably mentally ill and/or rock bottom alcoholic/addict, sweaty, dirty, wild-eyed and fevered looking human beings who may or may not be around town the rest of the year but become glaringly visible in summer. Wandering, sometimes shirtless in the pitiless sun, sometimes in far too many layers of clothing, often yelling at invisibles or muttering to themselves. Living outside in the concrete, tar, piss, exhaust fumes, unrelenting sun and triple digit temps of the Tempe, Arizona summer. There are also apparently the less serious cases, usually with the air of methamphetamine addicts, also incredibly sweaty and grimy, looking like they have backed right up to the very edge of the cliff of permanent and irreversible madness. Sometimes these human beings are doing seemingly impossible things, like skateboarding when it is 118 degrees out, or begging on a corner of major highways, no hat on their head in the sun, bearing signs about being a “US Veteran Hungry Anything Helps God Bless America.”
I can’t help but wonder how many failures of love and care there were along the way, for human beings to end up as one of the summer people. Not failure as in a judgmental thing, just the impossibility. I think about how each one of these sun-battled grimy, sweaty, vacant or wild-eyed human beings was someone’s child, maybe someone’s brother, uncle, aunt; or someone’s friend, lover, partner. What is the great chain of totally inhumane, all-too-human failure that makes this kind of human being possible in the midst of so much material abundance, so much throwaway culture? Why do we not have a humane, compassionate, supportive civilization where absolutely no human being has to suffer this kind of degradation and daily agony? Why have we not built our human world with a wider net to catch more of us, with more reliable care and systems of support, with more tenderness and empathy? Our own human world, after all, is a world of our own making. Why have we not made a world where no one is disposable?
It feels to me like the end of many worlds, when I see or talk with some of these summer people here. Their stories are characterized often by a single, catastrophic loss or break of some kind, either in their minds or in the world or both, and their humans couldn’t have them around anymore, or they became unemployable and lost everything, or they have that knife edge defiant rebellious fierce burning in their souls, where endless ragged and painful days are better than whatever they came from.
Maybe their humans did the best they could, maybe their humans were horrific and abusive monsters. Whatever the story, our hearts usually go out more to an injured cat or a lost dog than to these summer people.
