I haven’t been able to write. If I’m honest, I haven’t tried. I mean, I’ve tried but it hasn’t felt like I was trying. I have important things I need to write, deadlines looming, and still I haven’t been able to write. Or try.
Today, when I should have been (trying) writing I was cleaning up the yard. I was shoveling a rusted oil drum filled with soil and shards into the garbage dumpster. It used to be home to a citrus tree, but the citrus received an upgrade… something less rusty. I wish my writing was less rusty.
While I was shoveling and corralling trimmed branches, doing my best to stuff it all into the canister, a man rolled up on a peddle cruiser. His name is Johnny and he told me he used to hang out in my neighborhood when he was young.
He took a nervous drag from his cigarette and was quiet.
Then he started to cry as he straddled his cruiser on the opposite side of my fence. He told me he’d been convicted as part of a shooting on Grand Avenue when he was seventeen years old. When the shot went off, he ran. But it appeared to some that he had fired the shot. A gun was never found but he was given a life sentence, of which he served thirty years, and was released six years ago.
He told me he didn’t do it and they tried him as an adult and the whole group of friends he was with served thirty years. He said he took a polygraph test and had never been more afraid. He told me he was shaking.
When they shortened his sentence, or decided they had been wrong to convict him in the first place, they released him. He was homeless for the first few years, in and out of housing for a few years, and recently moved into an apartment nearby. He told me he has a disc causing him a lot of pain in his back so he can’t work right now.
Finally the tears subsided. He said he used to go to the lowrider shows with my Mexican neighbors. But now the shows are too far away. He told me he liked my yard and that he’ll say hi when he rides by.
As he rode away, apparently in search of a twenty dollar loan from his buddy, I decided I believed everything he’d just said. And I cried my own set of tears at the helplessness of it all, a young life unsupported in a prison, a tomb if you will. Just two days after we celebrated the resurrection of Jesus, I was reminded so many like Johnny are still being buried… waiting to live.