Jake Parkinson

I watched a University of Utah custodian flush a middle-aged homeless man from behind baggy curtains and walk him outside. That was a little after midnight, two weeks before Christmas, almost three years ago. Today outside the Union I passed the same man tacking a handwritten message to a campus bulletin board. To publish his thoughts he pushed a combination of pins and thumbtacks into the pine board.
The headline read: “YOU BREAK IT, YOU OWN IT!”
He quoted a passage from The Great Gatsby. “They were careless people. …They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…"
Fitzgerald wrote the statement referring to Tom and Daisy, but the homeless man was talking about our country’s military actions overseas.
He wrote the message on what appeared to be a Xerox copy of a statistics textbook. A section in bold letters was titled “Results of Hierarchical Multiple Regression Analysis.”

Posted by jake at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Major Street between State and Main has a lot of minority traffic. It's Thursday around 8:15 a.m. Somali women wearing brightly colored headscarves and dresses gather on the sidewalk. They greet each other with slapping hands, loud chatter and toothy and toothless smiles.
Less than one hundred yards away a billboard greets the northbound traffic of State Street. It reads: “The National Alliance Securing the Future for European Americans.”
The women, new to this country, don't understand the billboard. Not yet. They’re waiting to attend an English class at the Utah Refugee Employment & Community Center. After months of language training they’ll be placed in low-skill, low-pay jobs.
After a year, many of the refugees may understand the billboard. Many, perhaps, understand the essence of it already.
Inside the center up three flights of stairs, a woman with a green and gold headscarf looks at her dirty finger nails and mumbles, “American crazy. America’s crazies.”
It’s impossible to grasp what the woman is trying to say. At the same time, it is easy to understand her emotion.

Posted by jake at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

She must have eaten a hot dog, or a gyro, something that was wrapped in the paperbacked foil she had flattened and folded into a neat square. The lady with Betty White’s hair eating dinner alone at the Costco food court looks at least 10 years White’s junior. She’s probably seventy something. She’s definitely widowed. And she eats her dessert, an ice cream sundae on a stick, without looking past the treat she holds in her hand.
A kindergarten-aged girl with a ponytail broke away from her dad and turned to the woman at the table.
“We have a puppy,” she said between sucks on a straw.
“Really,” she replied, adding three or four syllables to the word. “And what’s its name?”
“Jane.”
“How nice. That’s my daughters name.”

Posted by jake at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)