I spotted Francois walking down Monument Road as I headed for the Day Center this morning. Usually, I bike in, but for various reasons I had to drive. He wasn't someone I knew or I'd have offered him a ride, because I had a hunch we were bound for the same place.
It's a commentary on America, I suppose, that when we see someone walking and carrying something other than rubberized hand weights, we assume they're homeless. In this case, however, it was true. He showed up later to do his laundry.
He'd ended up here by accident, heading back to East Texas after visiting his mother in Portland as she gradually disappeared in a fog of Alzheimers. Driving at night south of Grand Junction, he hit a large buck that left his car driveable — unfortunately driveable enough that he fried the transmission. $3500 in damage, he said. Money he didn't have.
He described to me the fix he planned to attempt. "I have a degree in shade tree mechanics," he said.
Charley doesn't have a degree, but that hasn't stopped him from checking the box on job applications that says he has a high school diploma.
"I don't sound stupid," he said, so it's easy to pass himself off as a high school graduate, and it's not as if they check resumes on fishing boats and road crews. But some conversations with his brother got him thinking: "It's deceitful."
So Charley went in at age 52 to see about getting his G.E.D. They told him he could take preliminary tests to see how he might score, but he said, "Just give me the tests." He took science and social studies and passed with lots of room to spare. Today, he was supposed to take the math test and wasn't so sure how he'd do.
He said someone had told him he could get a PhD using the computer at the library, and he imagined the G.E.D. would be a step in that direction, except he didn't have the six years he thought it would take. Not with working, too. But he got the idea he'd like a degree in paleontology because he'd once gathered dinosaur bones from a canyon in Montana.
"Once you find a fossil, you're hooked for life," he said. The place was now restricted, and he wanted to get a permit to go back in and excavate. For three years, he applied and for three years was turned down. Finally, he said, they sent him a letter that said, if you don't have a PhD, you'll never get a permit, so please stop bothering us.
A volunteer and I were talking about Turkey. We were shaking our heads at Rick Perry's perception the country was ruled by Islamic terrorists, and how little Americans knew about the rest of the world. Marty joined in the conversation when he heard me talking about seeing the remains of the ancient, powerful civilizations that had come and gone in Turkey.
As the son of an airline pilot, he'd lived in the middle east and traveled extensively. We talked about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in Turkey, and when I was slow to dredge up the names, he provided them (the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus). He described the layers of civilization he could see living in Beirut going back 4000 years to the Phoenicians, and he laughed at the historical designation on the 200-year-old bar in Seattle he frequented as a student at the University of Washington.
Marty is one of the most articulate people I've met at the Day Center, but he's not the most highly educated. That honor goes to the owner of the "shopping cart limo" — the four carts parked out back and covered with carpet pad.
