let’s talk about whoooooores!

August 1: Heidi was worried about eating her fried pickles too soon. She held one cupped in two hands, gently blowing and looking like she was playing the harmonica. They were still hot and she had a habit of not being able to wait long enough for the oil to cool and end up blistering the roof of her mouth. She would spend the next few days dealing with the chandelier of dead gums that hung just behind her incisors.

August 2: Wiggins has been following behind me so closely that his little nose bumps against the back of my calves when I come to a sudden stop.

August 3: We drove back to San Francisco through the part of California that where the heat was in the triple digits and larges stretches of land alternate between prisons and cow farms. I’m not sure which was the more out of place things we saw today, a car pulled over onto the freeway that was completely on fire or the car that had so many pine tree air fresheners that the owner ran out of room on the review mirror and dangled more from a command utility hook installed in the windshield.

August 4: I have been missing my kids so much these last few weeks. I’m so excited to see them again, but I also have a feeling that within the first half hour I will wonder why I missed them so much.

August 5: On the first day back, they had us do a scavenger hunt. We had to take a selfie in front of the church that started our program, get Eddie’s signature from his second desk at Muddy Waters, and awkwardly ask people on the street for a money donation to Mission Graduates.

August 6: The minimum wage rate in Mission Graduates has gone up to $18 an hour. Which sounds great, but it’s been making returning staff anxious. It’s all anyone talked about during the lunch breaks of training. A lot of us spent years here and aren’t even at that much. They worry we will be making the same amount as people coming in this year.

August 7: Mission Graduates is opening a new school at Cleveland. A new site plus a lot of staff leaving means we have been meeting a lot of new people this week. Melissa hired someone named Diego to replace Maria. We have not met him yet and they say he won’t be here until two weeks into the school year. We are starting to suspect that he is not real.

August 8: We were sat outside along the water’s edge where the seagulls could watch us with anticipation while we ate our mound of crab legs, sausage slices, potatoes, and shrimp. We both wore bibs and were armed with wooden mallets to break apart the shells before dumping them into the metal bowl in the middle of the table. Despite how cold it got after the sun set, our butter managed to stay liquid for half an hour before it congealed over and we had to ask for more.

August 9: After a fire destroyed 31 blocks of Seattle, the city decided to rebuild on top of what was destroyed. The streets were elevated that what used to be the ground floor of buildings were now underground. We took a tour of the deserted underground levels of these buildings. The tour guide was named Serene because her mother wanted a calm, quiet child. This guide belted out every sentence she said like if was the chorus of the title song in a Broadway musical. “Let’s talk about whoooooores!” sang, her voice echoing in the empty cambers around us. Then she told us about all the not very successful ways that prostitutes tried to avoid pregnancy, including shoving metal coins and half a lemon up what she referred to as their “squish mitten”.




much love,
hedgie