Loreena the Homeless Grant Writer

A woman with long blonde hair wearing glasses and a red jacket sat at an angle on a bench outside the Milwaukie, Oregon library. She appeared anywhere from 60 to 80. Her cracked phone was plugged into an outlet. A backpack and shopping bag rested on the bench. Several feet away, stood a wire rolling cart neatly crammed with possessions, including a rolled, blue sleeping bag.

I had just exited the library after checking out some magazines. It was 10:30 in the morning on a weekday in September.

The woman’s physical presence did not suggest homelessness, but the physical evidence arrayed around her did. She exuded total sobriety.

She was writing in a spiral notebook and had filled an entire page with a neat cursive script of the type almost extinct in American life. She wrote with a huge turquoise ring on her right hand. It looked pretty cool sliding above the paper.

If I see someone writing in longhand on paper in public, I always ask what they are writing. Always.

So I asked her.

“A grant,” she said.

What the hell?

“A grant!” I said. “What’s it for?’

“To attract tourists to the area.”

I asked her about nature of the grant.

The woman went on to describe what I quickly recognized as a grant program to receive funds from Oregon tourism officials to create and promote tourism opportunities in communities all across the state.

And how did I know that? Because years ago I had written several successful grants from this program to promote literary festivals on the Central Oregon Coast. I also was paid to speak on Oregon’s unique conservation history at an event funded by the program, a regional gathering in Bend of rural water treatment operators. Yes, I gigged a gathering focused on helping keep shit out of people’s lives! I think I sold a hundred books that day and exited with a couple grand of cash in my pockets.

I asked the woman how she’d heard about the grant.

“The internet,” she said.

“So what’s the idea to promote tourism?” I said.

The woman perked up on hearing my question.

“I’m a rock hound!” she said and then launched into her proposal with gusto:

Loreena owned a vast collection of stones (secured in her storage unit) that she claimed had spiritual significance to many of the Willamette Valley Native American tribes, now long vanished from their ancestral homes. She’d harvested them along the creeks and rivers of the Willamette River watershed for decades. Loreena was an expert in lapidary (one of my favorite words and pastimes of all time!) and brought out all the long dormant luster and stories the stones had to offer.

She wanted to display them in a pop-up gallery in downtown Milwaukie with signage educating visitors about the the indigenous peoples of the area. Milwaukie had a tiny historical museum but it wasn’t downtown and only open one day a week.

I thought it a marvelous idea and said so. Downtown Milwaukie had multiple vacant storefronts and could use some more foot traffic. Students from the high school and Montessori school could walk to the gallery with their teachers in the space of one period.

As Loreena outlined her proposal, a short and rotund homeless man in his 40s pushed a shopping cart toward us and then stopped at the bench. All the time he was dinging a bicycle bell. It upset my concentration.

He gave Loreena a doughnut, then hijacked out moment. I turned to him and said, with some force, “Hey man, we’re having a conversation here!” Later, I would recall the tone of my voice and the content of my communication as very much similar to Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy when he’s crossing the street and talking to John Voight and a car almost runs him over.

My words seemed to break the man’s spell spell and he moved on dinging the bell and talking to the universe.

Loreena finished her pitch and I said it was fantastic idea. She was going to have to type it up and submit online but the library could help with that.

“Well,” she said, “I”m homeless right now and it’s tough.”

“Where are you going to sleep tonight?” I said.

“Right on this bench.”

“It’s going to start raining soon.”

“I know.”

What ensued was a rather lengthy discussion about her personal story of misfortune and various attempts to secure housing. Below is the gist of what she told me:

Loreena was 68. She received the minimum Social Security monthly payment: she also had a small pension. Together they weren’t enough for decent housing with anything leftover to live on. Her husband had run off year ago and drained their bank account. Her daughter had recently died of cancer and her adult grandson had fled to Medford. Loreena had availed herself of some of the housing services in the county and they had placed in her an apartment on the third floor of a building without an elevator. She told her caseworker she had to reside on the ground floor because of two knee replacements; consistently walking up stairs was physically impossible for her. She left after a couple of weeks. She had a line on some more housing but didn’t trust the providers. She claimed they’d burned her a couple of times, but didn’t elaborate.

Did I believe Loreena’s story? Every word of it. The truth was sitting right in front of me.

Emotion began to overtake me, but I held it together. I fished out a $5 bill and handed it to her.

“Take care,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

I walked away to my car with my magazines, none of which contained any kind of the incredible story I had just heard.