My shoulder hurts sometimes from the two years that I spent homeless from 2011-2013, carrying a heavy backpack. I liked that backpack, but it finally disintegrated from the strain of my being homeless; that's when it started hurting and so I had to throw it out. I never had a locker at the Pine Street Inn during those two years. I had a locker at Rosie's Place for a while, which was taken from me when I was permanently barred from Rosie's Place after being emotionally abused a lot at that shelter. I had a bin at the storage room at On The Rise until I got the apartment in Braintree from which I was evicted by the abusive, dishonest landlord after less than a year.
When you're homeless, your backpack is important. It has to be sturdy enough to carry around several days' worth of things that you'll need, without breaking after a few weeks or months.
I talked about the backpack that I have when I bought it. I had looked in several stores for something that was larger than a regular academic backpack and not as expensive as a hiking backpack. I finally got the backpack that I have from the men's section at Nordstrom.
How many more times do I have to explain what it means to have to make do with what you can get, and how that's not the same as having all the money and time in the world that you choose to spend on promoting or supporting crime?
If I hadn't had to buy two pairs of boots this month, maybe I could have afforded to buy another backpack. The boots that I wore last year were soaked through in 10 minutes a few weeks ago, after the first snow/rain that Boston had. I bought a pair of what were supposed to be waterproof boots, but one of them got a large rip after a couple of weeks, probably from being stuffed in the locker at the Pine Street Inn. Since they stopped being waterproof as soon as that happened, I had to put them in storage and buy another pair of boots. It took me a couple of hours of walking around the aisles at the discount department store called Marshalls, where I had bought the previous pair of boots and where there is always at least one staff person or customer who coughs at me every time that I'm there, to find a pair of boots that weren't prohibitively expensive and which also wouldn't be negatively interpreted by other people.
I bought those boots. One of my feet is enough larger than the other that my right foot has had some pain and numbness every day since I got them.
Copyright L. Kochman, January 19, 2016 @ 6:06 p.m.