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FEAST OR FAMINE
Three squares a day is not an option for many vagabonds
(unless they're in jail),
so food is where you find it, as I was to learn several years ago when I hung with a homeless woman who lived in her little red Toyota pickup.
For a while we were a part of the vehicularly housed community in
San Francisco.
Under the reign of then-Mayor Willie Brown, promises were made to community activists to set aside a portion of land
for a permanent camp site for people living in their vehicles.
Of course, like other promises, it just never, ever happened.
Meanwhile, I learned how to make Street Soup from Jo-jo.
Together, on Saturday evenings when the Alemany produce market had closed and vendors vacated their fruit and vegetable stalls, we would scour the parking lot for bits of vegetables left behind on the pavement. She would always shove a discarded plastic bag in my hand and say, "If you want dinner tonight, you'd better get busy and start pickin." So into my bag would go whatever I could find: a couple of mushy tomatoes,a handful of long green beans, onions that had fallen off a truck, some tiny red hot chile peppers, a few new red potatoes, a wilted bunch of parsley, more tomatoes, an ear of corn-on-the-cob, and sometimes withered turnips.
While I was still working the parking lot, Jo-jo would open the tail gate of her pickup and get out a big pot, a gallon jug of water, and a long cylinder propane stove with a single ring burner. After she had fired up the stove and put some water in the pot and balanced it on the burner, we would use the remainder of the water to wash the veggies, cutting off rotten spots, discarding bruises, and then toss them all into the pot to boil for a while. Meantime, Jo-jo would take out her bottle of whiskey (she always had one stashed away being her front seat) and pour us each a two-finger drink in paper cups while we hunkered down on folding stools next to the stove for warmth and the soup bubbled on...
After about an hour, time we were usually on our second (or third) drink, she would announced dinner was ready. By then the vegetables had cooked down into a thick and chunky broth but Jo-jo usually forgot to add salt, so she would rummage around in the back of her truck, unearth an old salt shaker, two spoons, a couple of dingy coffee mugs to use as soup bowls and the perpetual box of stale saltine crackers.
Evenings would turn damp and dark but we were always warmed by the rich broth and the whiskey and each other's company. Over the years I've lost track of Jo-jo and often wondered what happened her but I have never forgotten those simple and nourishing meals.
posted by sylviawander @ 7:29 PM
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