Lazy days of summer

These past few days I have been hanging around the house helping, cleaning, cooking, and giving out the food every day for the lunch service. There has been a lot of reading as well, and thinking. I don't have a library card yet, so I looked in the bookshelf downstairs and found Barack Obama's book, "Dreams of my Father". I haven't been able to put it down.

There is a passage I read earlier this morning about when he lived in Indonesia. His mom was married to Lolo, a man from Indonesia. This passage gave Lolo's advice about how to deal with beggars, and since I am handing out free food every day, I thought it was relevant.

"Like how to deal with beggars. They seemed to be everywhere, a gallery of ills -- men, women, children, in tattered clothing matted with dirt, some without arms, others without feet, victims of scurvy or polio or leprosy walking on their hands or rolling down the crowded sidewalks in jerry-built carts, their legs twisted behind them like contortionists'. At first, I watched my mother give over her money to anyone who stopped at our door or stretched our an arm as we passed on the streets. Later, when it became clear that the tide of pain was endless, she gave more selectively, learning to calibrate the level of misery. Lolo thought her moral calculations endearing but silly, and whenever he caught me following her example with the few coins in my possession, he would raise his eyebrows and take me aside.

"How much money do you have?" he would ask.

I'd empty my pocket. "Thirty rupiah."

"How many beggars are there on the street?"

I tried to imagine the number that had come by the house in the last week. "You see?" he said, once it was clear I'd lost count. "Better to save your money and make sure you don't end up on the street yourself."

Here is my book and a house guitar in the dining room.

Here is the porch that I sit on to read and look out at the corner of International and 50th.

...and here is the view from that porch.