Home > The Diaries > (6)

The Diaries

Six months & three days in -- Two seconds in the life

Previous | Next

Greetings to all. These messages seem to be appearing farther and farther apart, perhaps because I am now in a rhythm that precludes much time for written reflection. I should not let that happen, should not waste the opportunities that Sundays in the “house” with my laptop have provided to stay in touch with all of you and to chronicle this “cheap spa experience”. But for the past month, I have used my Sundays to re-build the flower beds here with white and red oak landscape timbers (ten to fourteen feet long 4X6s, weighing 100+ pounds apiece) and that has been a pleasantly distracting project. But now that is done, now there are two levels of rough-cut, weather-proofed timbers notched and nailed together with twelve inch spikes holding the fleeting fancy of the flowers in place, with enough left over to build a five level entranceway into the lobby. A stair-step design, symbolic of the levels of privileges that those released from prison who come to this “house” can earn to gradually become part of the non-confined world.

I’m not sure what it represents for those of us who cannot earn such privileges -- maybe just some rustic and solid structure, some sign of a job well-done, some evidence of being greeted by my handiwork every day, of eventually leaving something behind that will last at least a little while. Something to bring satisfied smiles to the eight other inmates who helped “get ‘er done”, including the female inmate who hunched over the wood drill to help prepare the starter holes to sink the spikes, much to the hooting amusement of the passive, sullen, self-righteous men who sat on their collective asses in the smoking area twenty feet away. The men who “wouldn’t do anything for Diersen”, even though this is the only place they live now.

But now that job is done, and it is time to take time to speak to all of you again. And to try to give you a more complete picture of “Big Man’s” world. Although I have shared snippets of my life here with all of you over the past few months, I have come to realize that I have probably not given you a very full picture of what my days here are like. Now that they have developed a routine all their own, it is time to let you know just what life inside this “house” – and outside it – is like for BOP #16502-075. Since workdays and Sundays are very different in their rhythm and rhyme, I’ll share with you “two seconds” of my life as it is lived now.

The work week (Monday through Saturday) – time to be away, to laugh and to breathe, to serve the Turnip Truck’s customers and to serve myself, with and from the garden

Morning in this “house” comes at 4:00 am most days, not because I have to be up at that time but because five of my dorm-mates start their days then. And since a few of them get up very loudly, the rest of us wake up with them. Our beds in the “penthouse” (our term) or “the old folks’ home” (the label given by the other inmates who still live 25+ together in the other two men’s dorms) are only three feet apart, without partitions, so there is no way to avoid the inevitable commotion of sleepy men getting up.

While most of the guys make an effort to be quiet, to open their lockers (which no longer squeak after I smuggled a can of WD-40 into the dorm and soaked down their hinges), to pull on their clothes and boots and to go to and from the communal toilet and shower area (that we share with the two other dorms of men), one or two dormies clomp around like they’re in a clogging contest, talking and laughing loudly and generally carrying on as if no one else mattered to them, least of all the five of us who are still trying to sleep.

And in truth, we do not matter to them. One guy in particular (who has since left) thought he was God’s gift to the world and didn’t hesitate to take center stage at every opportunity, whether it was banging around in his work boots at 4:00 am or speaking dirty (and loudly) to his wife on his contraband cell-phone late at night. But then, that one (“Bad Bob”) had been in and out of prison for the past fifteen years (after saddling his wife with six kids in eight years beforehand), doing whatever got him there in the first place as a mid-level leader of a West Coast biker gang and then dropping dirty urines periodically to win him return stays in these non-rehabilitating environs several times since. But then he went home last month, and our loss (of his noisy presence) was his wife’s gain (though I wonder how she is feeling right about now).

So with Bad Bob the biker’s early morning “hear me, feel me, marvel at my magnificence” early morning dance, I would normally roll slowly out of bed by 5:00 am, after laying there for an hour to stretch my back and to think early morning restless thoughts. At 5:00 am, the “house’s” sole exercise bike is generally available and the CMOs (correctional monitoring officers) are usually willing to let me inside the room to use it. I take a book to read (I’ve finished We’re All Doing Time, Saying Yes, Be Free Where You Are and The Constant Gardener already) and generally get 6-8 pages read while pedaling my first 40 minutes, watching the Nashville skyline (the part I can see – two blocks southwest, across vacant parking lots, all the way to Cummins Station and its neighboring titty bars and night clubs) brighten slowly. The 40 minutes of pedaling and reading is followed by 20 minutes of pedaling and isometric exercise gripping the bike’s handlebars, a time when my heart really starts pumping and the sweat rolls down my forehead and face, soaking through yesterday’s work clothes.

After the workout, it is usually time for a 6:00 am breakfast, which for me is often a bowl of dry cereal (Cheerios if I’m lucky, frosted flakes if I’m not), a glass of milk and orange juice and sometimes a piece of fruit to carry on to work. The “house” closes by 6:30 am for morning details, so those of us who do not have details have to go back up to our dorms to be counted (something that happens 6-8 times daily), wait for the work details to be completed and then for the CMOs to open up the house again. However, now that I have a permanent work assignment to landscape the “house”, I can go outside at any time (even while the “house” is closed) and, depending on my work schedule for the day, I usually find something to do in the flower beds for a half hour or so during this time. It is always quiet, the cool spring mornings that have returned after an overly hot April are the best time of day and my young doves (hatched in the paper-barked birch tree out front) still linger in the flower beds, looking for more sunflower seeds that I still bring for them from work.

We are allowed access to the bathroom even during “house closed” times, so I can shower and shave (while showering) and enjoy those few hot, wet, private moments that individual shower stalls provide here. (Turns out that I didn’t need “soap on a rope” after all in here, despite my friends’ concerns at my “going away” party.) I did learn early on to avoid the two older showers in the bathroom, because every time someone turns on a faucet or flushes a toilet, whoever is in those showers gets a 200+ degree scalding wake-up call. If possible, I use the shower stall to the far right because it is the only one with good water pressure and a functioning shower nozzle, and I often linger long there, starting the day hot, clean and quiet. Back home, the small water heater in my cabin would never allow such warm, wet luxury, so I take advantage of one of the few differences between my home and this “house” that I am thankful for.

After the shower (drying off and dressing inside the shower stall to follow the unwritten rule of not showing our asses to each other), it’s either back outside, back to the dorm to await the house being “opened” or head downstairs to clock out for work. Clocking out means completing a worksheet, listing the name, address and phone number of where we work and when we’ll be back, and then signing and clocking out on a time-punch machine. If I am to go to required counseling (another requirement of this sentence) or to 12-STEP (on Saturday mornings, something I am now allowed to do again), then the same routine applies. Our whereabouts must be recorded on that green sigh-out sheet, just in case Big Brother wants to know. After that, it’s out the door.

My trip to work is not long. In fact, now that the weather has gotten better, I will start riding my bicycle there. Out to 8th Avenue, past the Greyhound bus station with its gathering of dreary-eyed and drab passengers, right on Demonbreun past the Gaylord Entertainment Center and the Country Music Hall of Fame, left on 4th, right on Broadway, left on 1st, to the top of the hill near the Nashville City Hall, across the Woodland Street bridge and then ten blocks to work. Through another of Nashville’s old neighborhoods, rediscovered a decade ago and still in the throes of a massive and impressive renovation. I pass people walking to work in downtown Nashville, every third face a Hispanic one at that time of day, and sometimes see the river bank dwelling homeless doing their own dazed wake-up ritual – walking with blankets wrapped tightly around their shoulders – on the bricks of Riverfront Park.

Most mornings, I am the second person at work. If the local coffee house is open (Bongo Java), I pick up a “BMF” cup (“big m----rf----r”, the coffee house’s own label for the biggest cup they sell) and nod to the regulars who also shop at the ‘Truck, many of whom ask routinely about my gardens and the weather. Then, if I can spare the time, I check my email messages on the available computer or visit my favorite political web-site ( to check on the day’s hopeful news or never-ending outrages on the Poseiden-like voyage that reflects our floundering body politic. Seldom any time to do more than speed read the listservs that still bring news of election reform to this newly non-voting partial citizen, to erase the myriad of spam messages from all those Nigerians who are so willing to trust me with their fortunes and to smile at the short notes from friends and family, saying “keep on keeping on” in so many loving and helpful ways.

Then my workday begins. The Turnip Truck is a small, upscale, organic grocery store that helped lead the renaissance of this neighborhood. I am one of perhaps a baker’s dozen employees who do everything to make the store work. That means handling the cash register, keeping the soup and sandwich areas supplied, and constantly stocking and re-stocking the shelves, coolers and freezers that help keep east Nashville well-fed. It also means sweeping and mopping the floors, wiping down the counters, emptying the trash and ensuring that there’s always toilet paper in the customers’ bathroom. It also means occasionally picking up trash outside the store that blows around the neighborhood and encouraging the neighborhood crack-heads and street drunks to take their rambling, panhandling ways a little farther down the line.

While we all do most things to keep the store functioning and friendly (we are definitely known as a friendly and fun-loving place with smiles for old-time and new customers, appreciation for every beautiful baby that comes inside our store and dog biscuits for those furry “family members” who remain outside, tied to the bike rack), some of us have developed our own niches that others defer to. For me, it is stocking the bulk food bins and driving the fork-lift on the days when our supply trucks arrive from Atlanta and California. Re-supply days are Mondays and Thursdays and since we have no storage space, we work as a team to get everything out to its proper place, unpacked and shelved, the packing boxes broken down and shoved in the recycling bin. Before the store doors open to customers, we do this work to the accompaniment of diverse (and loud) music (one of the store managers once owned a record store and many of my co-workers are musicians, so the musical choices are eclectic and excellent), wielding our box cutters and weaving around each other in a well-orchestrated cycle of replenishment. Most truck days, this work is not done before customers arrive, so we persist as the customers walk among us, sometimes pealing off one or more of us to help them find what they need (or think they need) at that moment. It is fast and satisfying work, if only to make small stacks of boxes from large stacks, and then to clear the aisles again.

Most days, there are only two or three of us handling the bulk of store chores, alternating as the cashiers and stockers. In addition, there is one person dedicated to the produce section (though I am beginning to learn that part of the operation also) and generally two people in the kitchen, making the day’s sandwiches and salads. There is also one clerical person keeping the store’s computers updated with products and prices and generally one manager floating around, finding projects for the rest of us to do or meeting (constantly, it seems) with the owner to plan and plot the next moves in the store. But regardless of what we do or what there is to be done, we smile and visit with the customers, laugh and joke with their children, help them in any way we can. And for me (and me alone), there are often talks about gardening, and in particular, our store gardens.

The store’s vegetable garden has been a great hit and a source of wonderment and bucolic joy in this reviving neighborhood on the edge of large housing projects and some still blighted byways. (My favorite zipcode-themed bumper sticker for the neighborhood simply says “37206 – we’ll steal your heart and your lawnmower”.) For the past month, our garden lettuces and greens have made their way into the store sandwiches, we’ve served a Thai-spiced snow pea salad to great acclaim and now we even have found room in the produce section for vegetables fresh-picked from the garden. Yesterday, under a sign that read “Goodies from Our Garden”, customers could buy red ursa kale, rainbow chard, bok choi, Osaka purple mustard, beets and turnips (with their greens attached), all of which had been growing just outside the store that morning. And now as I am planting the summer vegetables, customers can marvel at the same small spaces in the garden supporting ready-to-harvest spring vegetables with the seedlings and small plants of our summer crops (small purple basil plants off-setting the red beets, sheepnose peppers nuzzling under ready-to-eat purple-top white globe turnips, zucchini squash seedlings peeking out from the many-colored mesclen salad greens that are starting to bolt -- to make seed.)

On Friday, I pulled the still-healthy snow pea vines from their trellises to make way for the dozen varieties of heirloom tomatoes that have now taken their place, with names like Cherokee Purple and Orange Banana, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter and Brandywine, Maryanna’s Peace and Green Zebra, Dr. Wyche’s Yellow and Garden Peach. And then on Saturday, I stopped by a large horse farm in Williamson county (on the way to my weekly 12-STEP meeting) and was rewarded with access to a small pile of well-aged horse manure and bedding, rotted to rich loam and filled with squirming earthworms. I added some of that rich new earth to every bed of the garden, those still producing spring vegetables and those newly planted with summer bounty soon-to-come. Tomorrow (Monday), after the truck is unloaded and the freezer, dairy case and shelves are re-stocked once again, I will pull more baby red lettuce from the garden, add an extra helping of this living soil and prepare to plant the sweet corn, the pole beans, the cucumbers and the okra. And thus to be (almost) done with the planting of the summer rotation.

I will also make at least two more trips to that horse farm to fill the spaces around the medicinal herb garden, to prepare a place for even more tomatoes (Amish Paste, Peacevine, San Maranzo, Bush Master – the latter better be a really good tomato!) and even more basil and other culinary herbs. Sometime this week, I will finally do a handout on what we have planted in our medicinal herb garden with a brief description of how those herbs have been used, in the past and in the present, to cure our ills. I am planning to leave a blank space in the display for cannabis, both to make a point and with the knowledge that if the neighbors will steal lawnmowers, they damn sure will pinch pot.)

And so the gardening discussions will continue, the neighborhood children will keep asking questions and keep gazing wide-eyed at what healthy food looks like when it is still getting ready to take its rightful place on their dinner plates. I look forward to many months yet of wowing the customers with the wondrous productivity of a 12 X 24 plot of land, nestled between the store and the parking lot, bordered by a bank (mine) and a church (not mine). And to the balance that this chance to keep putting my hands in the dirt every day gives me, to keep birthing my Mother’s bounty for all to see and to share that bounty with as many as come close.

The bounty now extends from the garden all the way back to the “house”. I have been bringing vegetables (from my garden and (slightly blemished) from the store’s produce display, saved from the dumpster) to feed my homies at the halfway house. The cook has been so thankful for these gifts and the other residents have been really jazzed to be eating more vegetables – and even fruit – from the store. Two days ago, I was able to bring three full boxes of produce – lettuce, collards, onions, tomatoes and quart boxes of fresh spring strawberries – back to the “house”. One inmate who helped unload the food told me later that those were the first strawberries he had eaten in over eight years. So tonight, for Sunday dinner, we shared a large fruit salad, made with cantaloupe, apples, pears and strawberries saved from the ‘Truck refuse pile to feed the bellies (and warm – and maybe soften – the hearts) of my fellow residents – halfway from being “down” (translation – in prison) to being free again. If only for a while.

One last second – Sundays in my world

From Monday to Saturday, my days are much the same. Some days they start early; some days they end late. Waking to noise, showering in silence, sliding through the still-sleeping streets of downtown Nashville, putting on my black apron and dangling name-tag for another day of stocking, sweeping, scanning, making change, making small talk (no -- friendly, supportive, neighborly and nurturing conversation) with familiar faces. There are some small differences, some days broken up by a chance to write and work on my one lingering project out in New Mexico, to attend my once-weekly 12-STEP meeting and to be renewed and reminded of what is important there. But no workday is as different as Sunday – my one day of enforced rest.

Here in the halfway house world, we are not allowed to work every day. And for folks like me – those who cannot earn weekend passes to go home – Sunday is the one day I must be here most of the day. I am allowed to attend church, which for me is the warm and friendly chapel of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, halfway between the halfway house and the ‘Truck. Since I am allowed out for three hours to attend church, I can still get my “BMF” at Bongo Java and can still be close to my Higher Power (Mother Earth) in the garden, before and after the church service. St. Ann’s is a very liberal parish with an excellent choir and thought-provoking sermons. I feel as comfortable there as I do inside any “house of worship”, away from the spiritual sanctuary that is my farm – where my God lives when She’s in need of her own peace and quiet.

After church, I return to the “house” for a late lunch (two sandwiches of something or other) and then usually take a nap, when the loud conversations of a “closed” house and a crowded dorm don’t intrude. And I write, as I am doing now, for a few hours, and then head to bed. Tonight, I am more tired than usual and my feet still hurt from sixty hours pacing on a concrete floor. So I will stop writing now and make plans for bed, maybe even before the evening light leaves the mid-spring sky. I will probably step outside for a breath of fresh air beforehand, for a moment or three to walk the “house” flower gardens, to breathe the cool air of blackberry winter, for a chance to think of all of you. I miss all of you, and hope to keep seeing some of you, at random times and in static places, until this time is past. In the last month, I have missed the college graduation of my nephew Daniel (he who is very much like me). And today I have missed the chance to wish a Happy Mother’s Day by phone and email to all the mothers in my life left after the passing of my own mother not so long ago. This is my first celebration of this day that is emptier than all that have come before. So for those of you who still can, hug your mothers extra-tight for me and kiss all of the “women among girls” that you know, though you can save some of those heart-deep kisses for me to give myself, when one of those women appears over my shoulder with her own hugs and kisses to give.

Happy Sunday evening, everyone. May the peace of your Higher Power be with you, as it is with me. At this moment, during this split second, halfway between somewhere and somewhere else.

Previous | Next