Waiting In the Woods

While he waits for his disability ruling, my oldest friend lives in a mother-in-law cottage in my backyard. I met him long ago, sometime in a magnolia-petal-strewn Southern Louisiana childhood  (he remembers that I was trying to keep kids from stepping on ants crossing the sidewalk; I remember that he was mocking Holy Roller girls who were making their fingernails grow in the name of Jesus). He’s been waiting for disability money since he moved back to Louisiana seventeen months ago from West Virginia.  He’s blind in one eye from glaucoma, can’t bend over from the ocular pressure and gets dizzy frequently. The vocational expert, when asked at the hearing last week if there was any job my friend could work at, testified with a curt “no.”

The judge said he’d rule in ninety days. 

For months now, my friend and I have walked together to the grocery—he doesn’t drive anymore because he’s blind, and I’ve never driven because of a long-standing phobia. I’m self-conscious about being on food stamps. The clerk remarks that it’s the second time this week I’ve bought brownies, and I feel judged because my husband is a brownie-holic. My friend says that the clerk is just making chit-chit, that this is the way Southerners are.  Carrying as many sale-cups of Dannon Yogurt as EBT will by, we pass by shirtless guys working on roofs, and my friend can’t ogle them like he used to but he never fails to mention my taste for skinny and pale men is gross. He’s played Truman Capote to my Harper Lee for as long as I can remember (or so some have observed—my friend has told me this week, with the release of To Set a Watchman, that he’s really Nelle and I am Truman) and others have compared us to timeless couples like Hansel and Gretel.  Lost in the woods, being fattened up for disaster… that’s sounds more apt than ever.

The lady at the food bank isn’t rude—or is she? Truman/Nelle isn’t with me to calm me down. It’s a church food bank and there is so much required to get your bags of food—social security cards for all members of the household (not copies), a recent bill showing residence, proof of income, disability award letters. The lady asks why no one in the household is working. I wasn’t asked this last time I came. My mouth drops open. I finally say, “I have the disability letters—my husband and my daughter---“

“We have work opportunity fliers,” she explains.

Ok. Because I want to give her the whole explanation right there. Like, do you want the short answer, lady?  Why am I not working? When will I be working? I have bipolar 1—that means that I actively hallucinate when I’m not properly medicated. That until my husband became disabled slightly over a year ago, I’d worked part-time teaching at various colleges but when my husband lost his insurance because Southern University imploded and my husband’s hours and students increased with no pay, another medical leave of absence wasn’t going to cut it and my husband lost his mind and his job and I lost my meds---deep breath—and I continued to work while hearing voices and I continued to work while caring for two special needs children. Oh, but then the college I worked for cut my hours. So I fled the sinking ship that was Baton Rouge Community College and went to work on trying to save my family. And oh, lady, my special needs daughter is on a ten year waiting list for services in this state. Work opportunities? Work? 

Cooking isn’t one of my talents, but my friend in the cottage in the backyard learned to prepare all kinds of tasty soups and rice dishes from his mom Melba, may she rest in peace, the greatest Southern gentlewoman I’ve ever known. He brings over cornbread and greasy masterpieces to put in my fridge at midnight so I’ll get first dibs on the food because he knows my predilection for getting up at dawn and is trying to fatten me up (I’ve lost a good deal of weight since the family has been on welfare—I don’t attribute this to any lack of calories because we actually eat fine but I’ve had a med change and I’ve been on the anxiety diet—nerves make me skinny).  Planning, budgeting, making lists---my talents lie there, and I’m eating expired welfare bagels with butter right now as I type this.  I just went over my general to do list—1)  Save enough money to take a driving class in the fall when my daughter is in school.  2) Pay for the background check for substitute teaching and finish the application process (I need some job before the end of 2015 to qualify for earned income tax credit on the 2015). I’m nervous about sub teaching because I’m used to going into every class with three or four back-up lessons. I hear it’s just babysitting, right? Will I even get the job?  The letter I got back from the East Baton Rouge Parish School system had three spelling errors, including the you/you’re error.  3) Fight Social Security again. 

I mentioned in a previous entry that a social security administration judge had ruled in our family’s favor over an alleged overpayment.  Now the local office doesn’t want to pay us back money it had garnished from my daughter’s SSI monthly payments and is, apparently, not complying with the judge’s order. In fact, the person I spoke with at the local office lied to me over the phone and told me that payments were being withheld for some issue that had occurred in 2013, not what the judge had ruled on---I totally believed her until my husband went “uh, that’s a lie,” found letters and papers, including the judge’s ruling that proved otherwise, and here we go again. I have to wonder how many trusting social security recipients are lied to, how many don’t have a clever husband like mine, don’t have the resources, the patience, THE GAS MONEY to schlepp to the social security office and fight for money that is rightfully theirs. I don’t know how many times my husband has gone to the office and correcting their bleeping arithmetic in order for our disabled little girl to get paid.

“I get so mad,” I tell my friend.

“Don’t,” he says, and when I say that’s like telling the sun not to rise, he makes a pot of red beans and sometimes that helps.  He used to be a writer and a voracious reader; now he’s legally blind and can’t read print books.  He moves on. He can listen to what audio books are available; he writes a sentence here and there when he can. One day he’ll get Medicare and I won’t worry so much about his tripping in the yard or getting mysterious headaches—he has absolutely no healthcare right now because Jindal didn’t expand Medicaid. One day my children will be a little more independent, and I may have a job with full insurance.  At the moment my husband’s Medicaid covers only six psychotherapy visits a year (not including the psychiatrist he sees for medications) and that really isn’t enough for someone who’s been in the hospital twice in one and half years and is disabled from major depression.  But in October, Max will have Medicare and maybe, maybe he’ll get better too.

I don’t see how my friend can be so Zen about waiting. He’s lived longer in poverty than I have. He doesn’t have an immediate family to worry about; he came here with his two cats at my request not long after he lost his job and promptly got lost with me in Louisiana’s dark forest of bureaucracy.

One day, though, Hansel and Gretel will escape.