Goals

 We had to have a woman arrested today, boarded up a house, and installed a basketball goal. 

About a month ago, we found a woman camping on our lot down the street. We have learned we can't let this slide, or they'll be there more or less permanently. 

We told her she had to leave. Her reaction was less common but again not entirely unknown to us: She launched into some legalese about how she had every right to be there and that she would be reporting us to the authorities. It wasn't really possible to have a rational discussion with her. We just settled for telling her she needed to move on.

We asked her why she didn't go in the shelter, which she declined to discuss. We found out later she had a permanent ban.

Day before yesterday, she was back, camping on the sidewalk down the street and talking nonstop. 

Yesterday in the middle of the day, a different woman squatted behind a wagon on the sidewalk across the street from us, looking nervously in all directions. When I looked up later she had left, leaving a smelly pile of shit behind.

I had thought maybe she was shitting just by her behavior, but couldn't believe someone would do it instead of slipping behind the building or something. 

That afternoon an older gentleman passed by carrying a bag of groceries atop his shopping cart while I was talking to a neighbor. He had been down at the grocery giveaway and told us someone there had called him a N******. He was angry. 

This man has appeared mostly innocuous, but he lets his Pit Bull accompany him without a leash.

I knew the man he was accusing, and ran into him the next day. Did you call him that, I asked him. No, he said. He was at the grocery giveaway and told the man he couldn't be around if he couldn't put his dog on a leash. Things escalated from there.

So today, we were about to install a basketball goal for the neighborhood kids. The kids came to me about two months ago wanting to borrow a broom. What do you want the broom for, I asked, knowing they weren't cleaning anything. They wanted to sweep off a concrete slab behind their houses so they could play basketball, they told me.

They had a rickety old water-filled-base basketball hoop with a bent rim. I went over with them to the slab and realized they would also need shovels. 

For the next several days, those kids toiled. They would come up to me after school and ask to use the broom and shovels. I would go over there with them and we would dig together. Right about the time we were finished, one of the neighbors came to me and pointed out that if we were to put a basketball goal in, one day a basketball would hit the windshield of her car, parked nearby. 

Around that time, a friend donated me an actual basketball goal. I called the owner of another lot across the street, and he was fine with us installing it there. So we dug a hole in that slab and cemented in the base of the pole. 

This morning we wanted to install the rest of the goal. Before we could get started, we saw the door of the vacant house next door was open. We went inside, and found someone's meth pipe, their cleaning tools, and a puddle of piss on the floor. 

We mopped up the piss and boarded up the door, and let the owners know what we had done.

As we got started the Chaplain passed by ranting in his usual fashion of late. The Chaplain, who I have mentioned before, was once a Chaplain's Assistant in the Army. Now he's on the street clearly suffering from mental issues which are not helped by the drugs he uses. When he's off his meds he faces away from his audience and preaches gibberish about the social contract. Luckily the kids were unfazed. 

After the Chaplain moved on, things quieted down. The woman I mentioned in the beginning was on the sidewalk maintaining a steady monologue. 

This state of affairs persisted until we had to slam two sections of the pole together against the concrete in order to get them to seat. The woman came over, and started assailing us for being on someone else's property while we had kicked her off our own. She didn't show any signs of winding down or moving on, and I called the cops. After some more heated discussion with the police, she was bundled off downtown and we resumed our work. 

It took hours. Right about the time we were finishing up, she came walking back down our street. She didn't pause to talk, but picked up her shopping cart from where we had put it and kept moving.

The kids played basketball.