The Hundred Story Home Page 12

  They ate, they slept, and they tried to remember what it was like to feel human again.

  Coleman entered the UMC substance-abuse treatment program and became its first graduate who also was a tenant with Homeless to Homes.

  Raymond did an interview with a local radio station. “What’s your favorite part of your new home?” the reporter asked.

  “The mailbox!” he said. “I love getting mail in my own mailbox! I even love getting junk mail. It makes me feel like a human again.”

  I think I somehow believed it would be that easy. Move in. Start life. Get mail. Live happily ever after. It was Raymond who let me know it wasn’t that simple.

  He was on his front porch tending his new tomato plants when I stopped by the apartments. Sitting on his concrete steps, he clearly looked lonely.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  Raymond shrugged, his silence speaking volumes, since he always had something to say. Joann was busy with another tenant, so I tried my best to help.

  “You want to talk?”

  Raymond hesitated, but decided I would be an acceptable substitute for Joann. “I just miss the center is all.”

  That surprised me, to say the least. I couldn’t imagine why Raymond missed all the people, the lines, and the struggles of street life.

  “I had friends there,” he said simply.

  “Raymond, you can go to the center anytime,” I assured him.

  The UMC was about a mile-and-a-half walk or an easy bus ride from his new apartment. We assumed tenants might visit for the art or gardening programs—another reason the proximity of these apartments was so perfect.

  Raymond shook his head. “I can’t be there anymore. I feel too guilty.”

  I was confused. “Why do you feel guilty?”

  “My friends are still on the streets. I have a home and they don’t,” he explained. “I can’t help them either.”

  Now I understood. Raymond had gained a home but lost his family.

  As difficult as life is on the streets, homelessness creates camaraderie. People who have nothing share something with each other. Even if they don’t share their true identity, they are well known to each other by street names: Chilly Willy, Dancing Bear, Peanut. On the streets, just as in high school or a workplace, natural groups form and friendships develop. People share things as small as cigarettes and as big as campsites.

  From this “street family” we had housed only thirteen men and women. These people had dozens of friends, and in some cases blood relatives, still on the streets. Raymond and the other twelve Homeless to Homes tenants had all signed the same lease agreement, which stated no one could come live with them. It was a requirement to keep order in the apartments. If our tenants allowed others to move in who were not part of the program, each resident in our program risked losing his own housing.

  We had chosen thirteen people to win this housing lottery. While they all might have known each other on the streets, they weren’t necessarily friends. Each was also struggling with his or her own readjustment to a typical life. In selecting tenants, I had never considered the community that we would disrupt or the new one that needed to be built. Raymond was housed now, but other than those in our program, anyone else he might befriend could never understand where he’d been. How could Raymond explain that his residence before this had been a barn? How could he make new friends with people who had no frame of reference for what he had endured the past few years?

  Raymond had made steady progress since moving in, but now that he didn’t wake up every day frantic about survival, he had time to consider his life.

  Right now, his life was decidedly lonely.

  Just as I had not envisioned our tenants’ quick progress in some areas, I had not imagined the depths of their struggles moving beyond the stigma of homelessness. Although Raymond was now safe inside, he carried a tremendous shame related to how he got there. His euphoria upon moving in had given way to isolation and depression.

  I was beginning to fully appreciate that while it was remarkable progress to save thirteen people from the streets, housing and living were two completely different matters.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said in my weekly phone call. “What’s new?”

  “I signed up for the trip to China with the museum!” Mom said.

  “Really?” I asked. The idea made me equally proud and terrified.

  I was impressed that she was going to fulfill this lifelong dream. Ever since my dad died Mom had become increasingly independent. We had all worried that when he was gone Mom would have to be hospitalized again, but it hadn’t happened. Even though Mom was doing well, she still struggled intermittently and I had never shaken the worry that a hospital stay was around any corner. What would we do if the long plane ride to Asia triggered a chemical imbalance while she was in Shanghai?

  “There’s a nice group going from El Paso, and we are even going to see the Terracotta Warriors!”

  “Wow, Mom, what an adventure! That’s going to be great,” I said, while secretly worrying how long it would take me or my sisters to board an emergency flight to Beijing. “What are you doing today?”

  “Well, I need to go to the store and get some more supplies for my bags,” she said.

  Ever since Mom read Same Kind of Different As Me, she had started her own campaign to help the homeless. She kept plastic bags in her car that had a bottle of water and small cans of food. When she saw someone at a stoplight asking for help, she would give them a bag.

  “Then I’m probably going to my office.”

  I smiled. Her office was Andrea’s card store. Mom would go in to buy her cards and then set up on one of the back tables intended for customers who were picking out wedding invitations. Mom sometimes even took her lunch with her—a smoothie or milkshake from Baskin-Robbins. She had a desk in her new apartment, but she still didn’t feel at home there. Ever since we had moved Mom into senior living, she spent most days trying to leave it. Not running away, just spending every minute she could somewhere else.

  Mom still drove to the same beauty shop fifteen minutes away even though there was a service in her building. Her daily routine became fixing herself breakfast and then leaving midmorning for the beauty shop, the bank, the nail salon, the grocery store, the post office, the card store, the church—anyplace for an errand. Pretty much anywhere but there suited her.

  Our weekly phone calls usually began with news of her book club or bridge group before a side comment about her new living arrangement.

  Mom constantly dropped subtle hints that she was the youngest, most active person in her new apartment community. “I went to visit my ninety-two-year-old friend down the hall yesterday.”

  She rarely told me anything about someone, except his or her age. I accused her of age profiling.

  “How is your program going?” she asked.

  “Well, pretty good,” I said. “A few tenants are having a hard time adjusting, you know. Even though it’s better than being homeless, I think getting used to life in a new apartment is really hard. Nothing feels familiar.”

  “I know,” Mom said.

  I hung up the phone, feeling humbled. It seemed my mom and Raymond were both teaching me some hard lessons about housing. It takes more than four walls and a bed to make a place feel like home.

  sixteen

  CHRISTMAS MIRACLES

  Christmas doesn’t just come in neatly wrapped presents. It comes in our beautiful messy attempts to love each other.

  —Becca Stevens1

  Along with hard lessons I was slowly realizing this project was much bigger than I had planned. Seven months into this Homeless to Homes experiment, we were convinced we needed to build our own apartment complex, but Dale and I both knew finding land, building apartments, and running a program for one hundred people was going to take expertise neither Dale nor I had.

  “This is going to take more than a graphic designer and a minister,” I told Dale.

  So far our team consisted of
only Bill Holt, the $3 million–dreaming banker. Dale and I brainstormed about friends who had the skills we needed. Matt Wall (real estate), Jerry Licari (business), Downie Saussy (construction), Hugh McColl III (finance), and David Furman (architecture). Throughout the next few years I would refer to them as my Five Guys.

  Our first assignment was an exploratory mission to evaluate all the possible sites. It was a dream team expedition to be sure. We were shopping for land that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars with absolutely no way to pay for it, in neighborhoods that surely would not want us. With six of us in an SUV, we’d slowly drive by properties and comment on the merits of a site.

  David, as the architect, carried the most weight. In my mind we would go with what he liked, until I realized he liked a two-acre junkyard full of rusting cars with a giant radio cell tower looming hundreds of feet in the air over the mounds of scrap metal.

  “Are you kidding?” I asked him. “With that radio tower?”

  “I like it!” he said. “It’s like yard art!”

  “Well, it’s the least expensive,” Dale agreed. “And it’s right near our Homeless to Homes apartments, so we know the neighborhood.”

  Matt was charged to investigate further and get ready to make an offer.

  Returning to my office, I saw the quote I had taped to my computer from last Christmas’s word-of-the-day calendar:

  Start some big, foolish project like Noah.

  It seemed we were doing just that. Our team put together a preliminary budget with land, construction, and some start-up operating costs: $10 million. Ten million.

  I wasn’t sure which was more improbable—the junkyard or the budget.

  In the fall of 2008, the recession was starting to sink the national psyche. Even if we could dream of raising $10 million someday, we needed $500,000 right now so we could buy land and have a site ready to build on.

  Dale and I brainstormed in his office.

  “What about the City of Charlotte?” I asked. “Shouldn’t there be a line item in the city budget for this?”

  Dale shook his head again. “We’ve never gotten any traction with the city. And to ask for city money, we have to own the land first.”

  “And to own the land we need the money!” I finished his thought. “To raise money from donors we need a site, and to buy a site we need money, but to get money we need—”

  “A miracle,” Dale said. We sat for a while in frustration before Dale offered, “You know, maybe I could call Dave Campbell.”

  Dave headed a family foundation and had been present at True Blessings when Denver shouted that Charlotte needed to build some beds. Dale set up a meeting with Dave, and when we arrived, I was so nervous I could barely speak. I had never asked anyone for money, much less a six-figure gift. We came prepared with a sketch David Furman had created of our three-story apartment dream on the two-acre junkyard property.

  Dale led our meeting with compelling stories from Homeless to Homes: Samuel going to community college, Jay and Coleman getting clean and sober. We presented data supporting our case that it was cheaper to house the chronically homeless rather than let them die on the streets or cycle through the jails and emergency rooms.

  Our potential donor seemed impressed and nodded along until Dale got to the ask: $500,000.

  “I love the work you do, Dale, but we can’t do that,” he told us. “It’s almost the end of the year and we are fully committed.”

  The answer crushed us both. We had secretly hoped Dave would somehow answer a prayer. This property might not be there next year. We had an option to buy but not forever. We truly needed a miracle.

  Nine days later my computer announced an unexpected message.

  I called Dale’s office immediately. “I just got an e-mail from Dave Campbell. He wants more information!”

  Maybe we still had a chance. Dale and I verified all our numbers before submitting answers to his questions.

  We waited nervously for a reply. A few days later, more questions arrived. We e-mailed more data and answers. A few weeks passed. Nothing.

  Then one morning, Dale walked into my office. “I just got off the phone with Dave.” He paused for dramatic effect. “They are sending a check for $500,000.”

  Dave had said the check would be in the mail, but Dale asked if we could pick it up to thank our miracle-makers in person.

  November 11, 2008—almost a year exactly to the date of the first True Blessings—we walked into a conference room to receive the first check for a housing dream we didn’t even have a year ago. With absolutely no fanfare, Dave Campbell graciously handed us a plain white envelope.

  We felt there should have been a band playing, a full chorus singing, and confetti falling from the ceiling. To Dave, it was just another day at the office. To us, this was the moment of a lifetime. And an early Christmas miracle.

  Every year my daughters wrote letters to Santa. Even when they were old enough to know who Santa really was, I made them write their Christmas wish lists as a letter to the North Pole.

  “If you don’t believe, you don’t receive!” I’d tell them.

  The main reason I kept insisting they write every year was because the letters were so entertaining. More than once, Kailey wrote:

  Dear Santa,

  For Christmas could I please, please have:

  Baby Brother

  Pink Barbie jeep

  Kailey was disappointed each Christmas when neither of these items appeared under our tree. Maddie’s and Emma’s lists were always suspiciously the same. I had long suspected that Maddie wrote Emma’s for her, thereby doubling her own chances of receiving what she wanted.

  Lauren, being the oldest, had the most experience appealing to Santa and used the most hilarious techniques. This is one of my favorites:

  Dear Santa,

  This Christmas, Lauren wants:

  1.To be shrunk to the size of Thumbelina

  2.Muzzles to put on the twins

  3.Industrial solvents

  4.Cookies

  5.iPod. Please give this one serious consideration

  Lauren was wise enough to know I always got her at least one thing on her list, and she was betting I would go for the iPod over the industrial solvents.

  In my first year as director of Homeless to Homes, I asked the residents to make a Santa wish list for Christmas 2008. This was the first Christmas in years many of them had been housed. Some, like Coleman, had spent many holidays on the streets.

  Instead of going to the UMC for its annual turkey celebration, Joann and I planned a special Christmas dinner for just our tenants. Ever since we realized how lonely tenants like Raymond were, we had been working to build a community. Joann and I organized birthday lunches, picnics, and even fishing trips to a local park.

  Christmas would be the first big holiday for our new family, and we wanted to make it special. We received a donation of thirteen three-foot trees, and a book club hosted an ornament-making party so the residents could create their own decorations. Everyone’s apartment was made festive with purchases from the dollar store, and we promised a Santa delivery on Christmas Eve with presents from the tenants’ wish lists.

  As we stood in the men’s department of Target, Emma and Maddie helped me sort through the thirteen letters. The tenants’ lists had been achingly simple.

  Socks. Underwear. A warm jacket.

  “Mom, we can’t just give these guys underwear!” Emma said when she saw the requests. Joann had told each resident they could ask for one “special wish,” and these were the items where we could have a little more fun.

  An NFL Carolina Panthers sweatshirt. A James Bond DVD. A pair of earrings.

  “Mom, do you think Samuel needs XL or XXL?” Maddie asked, holding up a Panthers jersey. That was a popular wish item and we already had several in the cart.

  My mom called while we were deciding.

  “Hey, Mom, I’m shopping for Homeless to Homes Christmas gifts, so I can’t talk right now.”
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  “Ooh, how fun! I’ll help! Let’s tell your sisters and make this our family service project this year!”

  As we all got older, my sisters and I didn’t really need much. So each year, Louise, Allyson, Mom, and I agreed to contribute to a charity in lieu of buying gifts for each other.

  “You get everyone something special from all the Green Girls,” my mom said. I smiled. I had been married more than twenty years, and I was still a Green Girl.

  With the extra funds from my family, we bought each resident everything on their lists plus a grocery gift card to make their own special dinner. We piled all the purchases on our dining-room table, where the twins wrapped thirteen sets of presents, careful to make each pile equal.

  “Mom, I think we need to get something more for TJ and Chuck. Their piles don’t look even,” Maddie said.

  “And Edna really got more than Ruth, so we need to go back for her too,” Emma added.

  Kailey made trays of Christmas cookies for each resident, and on Christmas Eve day, we caravanned in two cars loaded with four girls and presents to take to the apartments.

  When we pulled up, Raymond was already waiting.

  “Welcome! Welcome!” he called to my girls as we got out of the car. As we approached his apartment, we could see he had wrapped his entire front door with silver foil and taped holiday greeting cards to it. “Merry Christmas!” he called out.

  “Merry Christmas, Raymond!” they said, giving him a hug as they entered his home.

  “Did you see my tree?” he asked.

  We all admired his small pine bending from the weight of the homemade ornaments. The tree was so small it barely came up to his waist, but to Raymond, it was better than the one in Rockefeller Center. “Look at that!” he said, pointing at the festive display in his living room. “I can’t believe it, no sir.” He choked up as he spoke to my girls. “Last Christmas I was living in a barn. I am blessed,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I am blessed.”

  That night at my home, we Izards opened one present each. It was a tradition started when Lauren and Kailey were younger and could not wait to open gifts on Christmas morning. In accordance with family tradition, we each selected one present and waited until it was our turn to unwrap as everyone watched.