Ever wonder what a homeless person looked like when they were in the third grade?
In this I am in league with Jacob Marley, a ghostly penitent of Charles Dickens’ imagination who never waited for the light to change at the corner of Russell and Conway streets amidst the median strip panhandlers. He didn’t have to because in this world, from London to Lansdowne, some things never change.
Awash in remorse – one teardrop too late to save himself – Marley thundered to Ebenezer Scrooge, “Mankind was my business!”
Mankind is in abundance – in tents, under cardboard and splayed out on lawn chairs – around Blessed Sacrament parish on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The church where Bing Crosby was married for the first time (1930) and a Mass of Christian Burial was held for slapstick king Mack Sennett (1960) is surrounded by the casualties of mortal curses.
In A Christmas Carol, those torments are personified by a boy named “Ignorance,” and his sister, “Want.”
They are as one, “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable.” Their youth puts the lie to my fanciful notion, that washing up on the street is a steep descent and not a pitiful trudge from cradle to grave.
Ignorance and Want – stand-ins for the urchins that Dickens knew so well, having been one himself – tremble beneath the robe of the Ghost of Christmas Present; the specter warning Scrooge, “Beware them both …”
I attended afternoon Mass at Blessed Sacrament earlier this month – December 6, the date of my first wedding 43 years ago. I sat in a pew near the altar and, until the priest mentioned it, wasn’t aware that Deborah Rudacille and I had exchanged vows in 1980 on the Feast of Saint Nicholas.
(Just 22, I signed the guest register at the Loyola College chapel “John Lennon,” no way of knowing that Beatle John would be taken from us two days later.)
At Blessed Sacrament, where John Wayne, Irene Dunne and Frank Capra traded stories after services, perhaps admiring the massive front doors of bronze donated by fabled director John Ford, buried from the church in 1973.
For some time now, the homeless and those close to the edge have been fed and counseled at Blessed Sacrament in bright Los Angeles sunshine, a glare that makes the gulf between haves and have-nots especially disconcerting.
Many of those in the orbit of Blessed Sacrament also attend Mass, as I discovered via the sound of someone slurping a kiddie box of Yoo-Hoo through a straw.
I turned to see a middle-aged woman, surely younger than she looked. She wore an old corduroy jacket like the kind high school kids used to wear, soiled hands just below the soiled cuffs.
In the silence that accompanies much of daily Mass, she began singing “O come, O come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel…that mourns in lonely exile here …”
Her voice was weak but beautiful. It reminded me of the mystical, 26-second recording “Tramp with Tom Waits & Full Orchestra,” in which a homeless Londoner – poetically known in Britain as “rough sleepers” – sings over and over and over again: “Jesus’ blood has never failed me yet, never failed me yet, never failed me yet…this one thing I know, cuz He loves me so…”
When it was time for Communion, which she did not receive, she again held forth, soloing on the John Michael Talbot hymn, “One Bread One Body.” At the moment for the faithful to offer one another a sign of peace, I approached her with a smile and an open hand. She quickly turned away.
The gospel reading was the miracle of the loaves and the fishes in which Christ feeds many thousands with a couple of fish and five loaves of bread. It’s my favorite of all the Bible stories, probably because my grandmother always knew how to stretch Sunday pasta in Highlandtown when a few more guests showed up than were expected.
After Mass, I stopped to shake the young priest’s hand – a Jesuit named Father Mike Manalastas –and asked the name of the woman who’d been singing.
“Laura,” he said and I thought, “She’s been singing those songs since she was eight-years-old.”
-o-
I was in Los Angeles the first week of December to celebrate an early Christmas with my daughter Amelia (Baltimore School for the Arts, ’99), her daughter Lake (age 3) and husband Jon, grandson of the singer and actor Ed Ames, who played “Mingo” on the 1960s television series Daniel Boone.
Amelia, born in the first year of my marriage to Deborah, was more than eight months pregnant and I wanted to spend time with her family before the new baby arrived. My first order of business as Lake’s grandfather: Buy a real tricycle, a red one made of metal with a silver ‘trrring‘ bell on the handlebars.
I found my way to Classic Toys on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City where they had exactly what one conjures when thinking of an early 1960s tricycle. Better than that, it was assembled.
Lo and behold, a few doors away from the toy store was Art’s delicatessen, where every meal is a “work of art.”
You don’t know what a smile is until you get one from strangers while carrying an old school kiddie trike down the street in the middle of the afternoon. I parked it beneath the table and enjoyed a corned beef on rye with brown mustard and raw onion.
Lake loved it, though she was told by her father (again, some things never change) not to ride it in the house. On this, at least that night, dear old dad was overruled by Mommy and the kid began working her legs to make it go.
All of this, however, took place after the biggest gift in the Alvarez family landed this year.
Amelia wasn’t due until on or about Christmas Eve. The first night I was in town I had dinner at her house. Jon cooked braised chicken thighs with sweet potatoes, carrots and dates in a Dutch Oven, a classic Ashkenazi dish called tzimmes. We strung lights on the tree and Amelia, feeling achy and out-of-sorts, read Lake a Little Golden Book about the life of Lucille Ball.
And then I went back to my hotel near the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where I took a photo of the sidewalk star honoring Alvin and the Chipmunks, one of Amelia’s favorite childhood cartoons.
I awoke the next morning to the news: Romee Jean had arrived, three weeks early and right on time. Perhaps one day when she’s about eight-years-old we’ll go to Mass together at Blessed Sacrament and I’ll tell her the story of her birth.
Rafael Alvarez wrote for network television in Los Angeles from 2005 through 2008. He was very glad to get back to the Holy Land of East Baltimore to chase the stories closest to his heart. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com
The ‘Holy Land of East Baltimore’. Yes, indeed.