This morning, miles from the nation's capital, in a suburb big enough for nearly anyone, I woke up cold. Sometimes the chill outside is just that fierce -- that even with three blankets, I'm a bit cold at 6:15 a.m.
This morning, in capitals across the country and in the smallest towns anyone ever bothered keeping around, men my age who have done more or less than I have woke up colder.
Much colder. They rent windows and heat by the cup of impossibly slowly nursed coffee, sitting as far as they can manage from storefronts, pyramiding their upper bodies over the liquid and inhaling its heat until it's cool enough to drink, then using their newly warmer hands to try to keep the coffee warm enough to keep warming themselves until the drops are gone.
And then it's back to huddling outside for warmth.
As a child, I walked a few times a year through D.C. in December or early January, looking on as some uncounted number of faceless lumps of human slept on the heat rising from the metro tunnels, however many carefully guarded blankets and old coats above them so they would be less cold when whatever too-brief night respite robbed them of their escape from cold and they were again faced with the metal grates they ... never called beds.
One year, I think my allowance was $12 a week. I mentioned to my mother as we were leaving the office that I thought I wanted to give it to one of the people out there to help.
"That's a very nice thought, Paddy, but we already give to charities that help homeless people," she counseled kindly.
"But they could use twelve dollars," I said. "They're cold."
She nodded politely. "But they might not spend it on food. And plus, we don't know them. I don't want to get close to a stranger in the dark."
And then my mother and father and my two sisters and my brother and I walked to the metro and I stared ahead so I wouldn't see the wisps of steam escaping from between the faceless lumps, now hidden by the customary dark.
From September to December 2002, I was homeless, but I was never cold.
I had friends in college, so I'd sleep in their room, or sometimes at home, or I'd drive across the state to sleep with my girlfriend.
But I didn't have an address. I wasn't living at home, just sleeping there, occasionally taking food from the pantry that I figured nobody would miss because it had been there for three years.
I opened one box of pasta and discovered a few bugs. I brushed them out, started to pour the pasta out into a friend's bowl and far more bugs crawled out.
Tossed the pasta. A friend had extra food from dinner, so I ate that.
Starting in 2003, I was living with my girlfriend, across the state. That's where my mother sent my mail, including my allowance -- $650 a month. (It was my money, but I wasn't old enough to access it myself.)
The luck of family heritage kept me warm those three months, though my parents would have taken me in had I asked.
As I write this, I have eight coupons that make 14.5-ounce jars of pasta sauce free.
Technically, I'm getting paid to buy the stuff with gas points. The coupons cost $.10 per, and the product is regularly $2.99, but a sale plus a store digital coupon plus the paper coupon makes it free, plus gas points.
Plus the gas to get there, plus the car holding the gas, plus my time, plus my knowledge of the sale, plus my credit card, plus the Internet access to view the flier and discover the deal and order the coupons, plus a place to put the sauce.
Those eight jars of sauce, or jars similar to them, will eventually go to a food bank because in addition to the eight jars I'll be getting tonight, I have twelve jars from last night and roughly fifty from previous sales.
I haven't paid more than thirty cents for a jar of pasta sauce in more than a year.
And that came in pretty handy when my former company, after two furloughs in four quarters, had another terrible sales month (the sales professionals at the family of newspapers where I worked didn't read the newspapers; hard to sell a product you're unfamiliar with) and laid off seventeen editorial employees.
Got called on vacation in another state and told I wouldn't be coming back to a job. So all the food I'd gotten practically free with other coupons came in right handy when our household income went from enough to not.
The point of unemployment is to give you just enough to scrape by with another earner in the house. The point of unemployment is not to give you enough to actually live on. $1,300 a month where I live isn't enough for insurance or rent.
Because of savings and food stockpiling and I'm very good at what I do, we only had to gash our savings, not inhale it and start selling plasma. I got a job three months after I got laid off.
We never had to move. We never had to move in with relatives. We were never cold. Other families, and other people my age, aren't close to as lucky.
A lot of things are free with coupons if you know what you're doing. I won't copy and paste the list from my social media coupon account -- where I tell my friends about deals, so that way people who want deals can follow and people who don't want can not bother -- but I think fresh vegetables, cheese and cereal are the only commonly eaten food things I haven't gotten free. I don't even pay for things like pickles or salad dressing anymore. I've been paid to buy salad. Grossed fifty dollars buying artificial sweetener.
But if you have trouble keeping your lights on, you don't have the $4 to spend on coupons for 40 free jars of pasta sauce. You have $1.50 for a jar that week.
So some of what we get goes to food banks. And when I got laid off, that stopped. We didn't have the money to buy coupons to make anything we didn't need free. (Hilariously, a few months after I was laid off, former company held a food drive. You can guess how much we didn't contribute.)
In several minutes, I will brave the wind and snow and drive to the grocery store for free pasta sauce before possible driving to another grocery store for cheap butter.
I'll be outside for maybe a few minutes. The faceless humans who will use what I buy (and some of what I have bought) may be outside longer if they are, for example,
hourly city employees who get pulled into snow duty tomorrow,
or postal workers,
or the receptionist, who sits 20 feet from the door and gets to hear everyone say it's perilously cold while the wind howls in for five seconds of torture.
Or their residences, if they're lucky enough to have them, have terrible windows because windows are an easy thing to save money on if you're building cheap housing. A year and a half ago, the wife and I lived in an apartment with one window that didn't close and another window that was cracked. Fortunately, that only meant our air conditioning gasped lifelessly ten months a year in South Texas.
When it's cold, a poor family will pile on the sweaters and blankets.
But when the cold has had all night or month to creep in, settling in the cracks in chairs and under the peeling linoleum, in the cabinets and couch cushions, sweaters and blankets do only so much. And eating cereal at 6:30 a.m. is hard when your hands are shaking. Then it's off to the bus stop in too-large boots that take on slush the bus tires kicked up, and you're not allowed to take your boots off on the bus, and then you can't get out from the crowd of kids marching into the school, so you still can't empty all that dirty water out, so your feet spend the next three hours drying out your socks, which will crust over with the evaporated slush's road salt and probably eat some more into that already thin sock fabric.
By the time lunch hits, you smell like outside, and there's no time to wash your socks off, which would just make them wet again.
The next day, you're amazed you got a C on that math test. All you could think about was your cold, mushy feet.
Across the country and around the world tonight, the faceless humans warming themselves wherever because they don't have a where don't care about climate change, most of them.
They care about the climate changing -- to hopefully warmer the next hour -- but climate change is a philosophical thing, and their nearly frostbitten hands are a physical thing. Maslow's hierarchy of needs tells us what's on their minds, and while many of them have probably kept some religious or philosophical truth because they need to maintain their consciences so they don't lose who they are ...
When you're cold, you're cold. Warm matters. Food matters. Blocking the wind matters. Why it's cold matters if you can change it, less if you can't.
Stay safe. Work toward a world that doesn't need my free pasta sauce.