I am in Jacksonville, Florida. In the Library. The city smells like burnt toast, don’t ask me why. The library doesn’t have a smell.

My first day here I wandered by something called The Cancer Survivors Park on Union Street. It is a small park outside a hospital, and it seems to be dedicated to bridge models. A man-made creek winds around less than a quarter-acre of land, bending back on itself again and again like a Japanese poem. Across each stretch is a miniaturized walker’s version of different bridge styles – arched, expansion, post-and-beam. There must be 7 or eight of them jammed together like the teeth on a comb.

In front of all those bridges is a sculpture. Of what, I’m not sure. People of various ages stand behind empty trapezoids as if they’re just about to duck their heads and walk through them. Are the trapezoids supposed to represent death? cancer survival? treatment options? I don’t know.

What is odd, even creepy, is that with two exceptions these life-size figures – an elderly couple, a young couple with a baby, an older couple with a 10 or 12-yr-old girl trying to escape their hold on her, a middle-aged woman clutching a purse, etc – have no expression. They stare into the distance as blind and uninvolved as ghosts, their faces blank, their eyes unfocused. Not just unfocused but unfocused as if they had never in their lives been focused. Not once. On anything.

The two exceptions are the old man and the 12-yr-old girl. She has a smile and her body shows an eagerness and liveliness the others don’t. She can’t wait to jump through the rings. He is sporting a scowl that would make Margaret Thatcher jealous, a vicious thing of snarling discontent. But at least it’s real. At least it’s human.

In the center of the park, below the clutch of bridges and surrounded by the creek, is a small stone bench. I rest there, dropping my pack beside me while I have a cigarette and try to remember how I got here from the untamed wilds of New England. It wasn’t easy. It took 3 years.

The Beginning

It is December of ‘07. I have run out of options. I have no job and can’t find a new one. My savings are gone, the $5000 my temporarily-flush brother gave me has been spent on rent and doctors and expensive medications. An eviction notice lies on the kitchen counter, mocking me. I have nowhere to go and no clue how to get there.

I will get no more help from my family. They are themselves strapped, my sister in the middle of a divorce after 23 years of marriage, both my brothers either sick or injured, unable to work. My father is still hale and hearty at 84 but that is not an option. Hasn’t been for decades. We get along well enough in short spurts, but moving in with him would eventually send one of us to an early grave.

Probably not him.

I’m aware that in many ways I’m not thinking too clearly. In many ways, though, I am thinking more clearly than I have in years. In the last 3 years, I have survived first prostate cancer and its treatment, then adult-onset Type 2 diabetes and its treatment. In both cases the treatment, while successful, turned out to be worse than the disease.

And more expensive.

There is no work where I live, at least no work that would pay enough so that I could live on it. I could work at McDonald’s flipping burgers or Wal-Mart stocking shelves for $6/hr. That would be enough to pay rent or buy food but not both. As a single man – white, not a veteran, not a minority, not yet eligible for Social Security (I and 59 and have 3 more years to wait), not disabled or insane, and having no dependents – I find I am not eligible for any govt help whatever. There will be no govt health insurance, food stamps, or subsidized housing.

I’m on my own.

The work, they say – what there is of it that hasn’t been moved to Sri Lanka by corporations eager to squeeze the last dying dime out of their expense sheet, and 3 cents-a-day labor costs is a ghood start – has gone South. “Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia!” people tell me. “Livable, not as expensive as here, and there’s lots of work.”

With few options raising their ugly heads, my clear-thinking mind and fuzzy-thinking mind agree:

Time to get the fuck out of here. I’ve been in New England too long. I came here for a woman 30 years ago and lost her 20 years ago, staying on because I lacked the will or the energy to go anywhere else. For a time I discovered my calling, and for 6 or 7 years it looked like I was going to carve out a life of my own, finally. Then George Bush came along and suddenly the calling for my calling evaporated. There was no money for it. The economy went into a tailspin, he started the Iraq war, and what I did went to the bottom of people’s list of things they were prepared to pay for. My profession shriveled up and all but died.

Yes, I had been here too long. Time to go. South, where it was warmer and there was tons of work.

So everyone said.