YC URL

2012-01-20T13:43:00.000-08:00

Yahoo Contributor URL may have changed to a new Yahoo Voices URL. Just sticking this here until I get it figured out.

http://contributor.yahoo.com/user/56332/alyce_rocco.html

You Make My Heart Sing

2012-01-13T16:15:00.001-08:00

Whenever I saw Albert he said: "You make my heart sing." I would say, "I bet you say that to all the ladies". And he would say, "No, I really mean it. When I see you my heart sings." Albert did not mean it in a romantic sense. We have all heard the expression: "Misery loves company", but truthfully when we see miserable people we want to run for the hills. Living on the streets can create misery and most homeless people have a sob story. Or two or three. Albert spent most of his time among other homeless people who, having no place to go, hung around at Lincoln Park. They complained.

They complained about the food. Lumpy or watery oatmeal, no salt, pepper, sugar, butter or margarine to give it some flavor. Hard, stale bread and weeks old cookies or sugary donuts were a routine part of every meal. They complained about coffee actually being chicory and perhaps a packet of sugar would be doled out with watery powdered milk to dilute the bitter mixture. Little cartons of milk were often sour. Mass cooked eggs were a favorite as were the little sausages severed with them, even though heartburn was often an after affect of eating them. It was not unusual to see flies buzzing around the food as one waited to get served. Coach roaches scurrying across the floor in broad daylight made meals a horror.

Then I would come along and say something like, "Well it is better than nothing". It is amazing what people will eat when they are starving. Some homeless people claim to grab pigeons, kill and roast them. Mouth watering, some homeless people grab food off a store shelf and slip it quickly under their coat. Some do eat what they find in the trash. "McDonald's throws out all the unsold food after closing" they will say, and it does not seem to matter that non-food trash is in the black, plastic garbage bag they pulled from the dumpster. Food and eating is just one of the things homeless people get miserable and grumble about. Albert, hanging with other homeless people daily, must have gotten tired of listening to it.

Albert had a ready smile for everyone. He told jokes to make people laugh and forget about their misery for a moment. He was generous; when he had something he shared it. He respected the ladies and they were all drawn to him. He liked "old time rock and roll" and used to play in a band. Now he played air guitar. He also sang sweet love ballads that he wrote. He never quite believed me when I told him his songs could be hits. He did not talk about the miserable conditions of being homeless, except in passing. "Did you sleep well last night?" might elicit a response of some new aches and pains or getting rousted by the cops at 3AM. The story he told that I most remember was this:

Back then the legal drinking age was 18. He went out to celebrate his 18th birthday with friends. He arrived home to find his draft notice. He went right from High School graduation to Viet Nam. He often wondered: "What if?", what might have happened in his life if he had not been forced to go to war. He did not spend much time on details of that experience, he simply drank to forget. The last time I spoke to Albert he was telling me about the Winter Shelter. It had just opened and not crowded. The food was great. After that he was no longer sitting on a wall by the library. I missed seeing his smile and hearing him tell me, as always, "You make my heart sing." We would chat for a few moments, exchange a hug and go off in different directions.

When another homeless cat told me about the guy that had a stroke or seizure at the Winter Shelter, he insisted: "You know Al", and described him, "Long, white hair". That could describe a number of homeless people and I searched my brain for Al's I know that fit it. So it was that I did not know it was Albert that had to be rushed to the hospital until several weeks later. I recalled one of our conversations when Albert was not his usual happy self. He said he was tired of living like this. My first thought was that he was willing himself to die. I visited him in the hospital that week.

In a coma, his face bloated so that I barely recognized him, I chatted away. I have always read that people in comas can hear or sense those around them. I thought I was paying my last respects, but months later he is still alive. He was taken off the machine that did his breathing for him. Even though he is a Vet, no one was able to find his family members. Searches could not locate his ex-wife or his daughters. I wonder if he is able to think and remember. If he can, I bet he is thinking he would rather be back out there on the streets in the company of miserable people than in that hospital bed. My heart will always smile when I think about Albert.

When you see your child, parent, sibling, partner or other loved one today, make sure you remember to tell them, "You make my heart sing", because we truly never know when those might be the last words spoken to those we love.

Self published at Associated Content on August 30, 2007

Article Comments Gone

2012-01-13T16:15:00.000-08:00

Comments received on article, You Make My Heart Sing, are gone. That is sad. Such a long time ago, would be impossible to recall what readers said. One of the readers said she cried, and others were touched by it; very positive response to the article that I wrote "straight from the heart" in about twenty minutes. No editing, other than spelling check. Sigh, sigh, sigh.

Whatever

2012-01-13T16:12:00.000-08:00

I printed as many of my self-published Associated Content turned Yahoo Contributor (YC) articles as I could during a visit to library. Seems like all those articles still appear at Yahoo Voices (YV).

History: a homeless blogger asked readers to read his articles at Associated Content (AC), which I promptly did. In order to leave a comment, if memory serves me, one needed to get an account. I have had so many accounts at so many places all over the web, it took me a few days before I decided to get an AC account.

The blurb said something like: Do you have something to say on this topic? (blah, blah, blah, get an account and get paid to write). Yes, I most certainly did have a lot to say regarding the homeless topic. My first two articles came straight from my Mary website. Creation of that website is another long story. I had already spent many, many hours on creating the site; research already done, turned a bit of it into my first two articles.

10 Mary's Who Changed the World
9 Marvelous Mary's

A year later, I wrote Celebrate Women's History Month, writing about women named Mary.

AC kept changing the site, making it harder to navigate. The list of published articles was simple to use. Scroll the page, at a glance determine which articles were submitted for pay, no pay, exclusive, non-exclusive, in addition to how many page views each article received.

Not so with the current YC/YV listing. Tedious process locating which articles I needed to copy here before they disappeared from the web. Much easier to just print them and let it all go. Most were garbage articles anyway.

Whatever.

Articles by Alter Ego

YC URL

You Make My Heart Sing

Article Comments Gone

Whatever