Building community, one garden at a time

“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” – Audrey Hepburn

No halfway house can survive without the support of the community it sits in and serves. The community support doesn’t often happen automatically -- it takes real effort on the part of the halfway house to be seen by the community as an asset. Sometimes halfway houses are seen as less than welcome presences in their neighborhoods.  This is usually the result of carelessness: sometimes on the part of the residents who live there and sometimes on the part of the employees who manage the house.

Christian Fellowship Home’s mission statement demands that we be seen as an asset to our neighborhood, which is a mixed used area adjacent to the center core of the city. It’s a neighborhood in flux, trying hard to recover from many years of “white flight” and urban decay and neglect.  The newest group of stakeholders, residential single-family property owners, has a vision of eventual gentrification that doesn’t always mesh with the present day reality of absentee landlords, rental properties, and a sizeable number of people in poverty.

In an effort to improve conditions and move the quality of living in our neighborhoods forward, our town has developed neighborhood associations.

The Villa Place Neighborhood Association represents the neighborhood where our halfway house sits, and we have tried hard to be a good neighbor to it.  Our residents pick up litter on Grace Street regularly through the Keep America Beautiful program.  They keep our buildings and grounds neat and maintained. At the yearly neighborhood association festival, we sponsor a food pantry, staffed by residents.

When Martin P. lived at the men’s home he discovered a passion for gardening.  He liked taking care of the yard so much that the house manager assigned him the chore permanently. He filled the flower beds around the house with flowers of all kinds, many of them bought at his own expense. He moved out when he got his own place and continued his work on the grounds as a volunteer, and does so to this day.

That’s how Martin met Ms. Barbara Johnson, the president of the neighborhood association. The association had been given the space for a community garden  in a vacant lot two blocks down, and after seeing his handiwork with the house beds, Ms. Johnson wanted his input and help on “fixing up” the community garden, which had an official sign to announce it’s presence, and very little else.

So a wonderful idea was born – to transform the empty lot into a miniature urban green space, with ornamental plantings and a central paved area to sit in. Martin drew up a master plan and a materials list with prices to estimate the cost.  But how was the project to be funded?

Lakeside Baptist Church had done several work projects to improve the Men’s Home over the years, including projects that had components like patio paving and flower bed construction. Would they be interested in adopting the Villa Place Community Garden as a work project?

It took a few months to work out the details, but Senior Pastor Jodie Wright’s congregation embraced the project, undertook the funding of materials, and even contributed a lovely new detail – they would construct and install a mini-library in the central paved area, with books on urban gardening, do-it-yourself home fix up projects, and other titles suited to our neighborhood. Our garden would be a garden of the mind and spirit as well as plants! The vision for our community garden was complete.

The city government, of course, had to give their green light on the project as well. Last night, the three of us – Martin, Ms. Barbara, and me, sat somewhat nervously in the planning department’s big committee room, while the Historic Preservation Commission reviewed our plans and asked questions.  And we got their approval! With our Certificate of Appropriateness in hand, our project was truly on the way!

So on a Saturday morning in early November, volunteers will meet to build the little park, and celebrate a useful and beautiful improvement to our neighborhood’s landscape. But we’ll also be celebrating something else: the synergy that can come together for the good of all when a halfway house, a neighborhood association and a church’s congregation all pull together to make the world a slightly better place.

The cat's name was what??!!?

“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may
hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”   --  Ernest Hemingway

“Relapse.” The cat’s name was “Relapse.”

Animals aren't usually found at a halfway house. A resident usually has enough to do with trying to be responsible for himself to a limited degree, so taking responsibility for the care and feeding of animals is usually beyond them. All halfway houses don’t have the fenced in yards or kennel space or budgeted dollars for the food and medical care required to keep a pet.  Most halfway houses don’t want the hassle of keeping a pet inside either. It’s a tragic end for the pet if a man who has gotten one relapses and leaves. Then the animal usually ends up at the animal shelter, with very little chance of survival.

But there was one cat, which took up residence at our halfway house, and he was a most remarkable animal.  One day the director came into the staff room with what looked like a small grey fur glove in his hands.

“What you got there?” we asked.

“It’s a cat, I got him at a yard sale.”

He turned the small grey ball loose and it streaked promptly under my bed, where no amount of coaxing could convince it to come out.

And there he stayed; ignoring the treats I tried to lure him out with.

After a couple of days, he poked his nose out and meowed. I brought him some canned food and a dish of water.  After he ate, he jumped up on the bed, purred a couple of times and curled into a tiny ball for a nap.

I guess after that he felt he was home. 

For a month or two, he was just “the cat” and then someone decided he should have a name. After analyzing his daily habits, we decided to call him “Relapse.” -- because he didn't go to any recovery meetings, he didn't do any chores around the house, he wouldn't get a job and wouldn't pay any fees, and he slept all day and stayed out late at night. On at least one occasion his name turned out to be a liability though. One man had gotten fond of the cat, had bought him some special treat at the Dollar Store and couldn't find the cat to give it to him. He stood at the back door and hollered for him, loud as he could, again and again -- until he realized that standing on the back steps of a halfway house and hollering “Relapse! Relapse! Relapse!” at the top of your lungs was probably not the best thing to do!

Relapse was a smart cat, and quickly figured out that the house cook was the man to watch for tasty things to eat and treats. And he quickly learned that the director, Ray, who loved to tease and scare him, was best avoided. Every time he heard Ray’s cowboy boots clumping down the hallway, he skedaddled.

Relapse was one of the only beings on earth who ever got the best of our director, Ray, who was willing to buy his cat food – only not the kind that Relapse preferred. Instead Ray would find the cheapest brand available and bring it home.

“He’s not going to eat that, Ray.”

“The hell he won’t. If he gets hungry enough he’ll eat it. Stop feeding him scraps and you’ll see.”

It was hard for me to cut out the extra treats I’d been enjoying fixing for my little buddy, but Ray was the boss, so I did as I was told.

Relapse took one look at what was in his bowl, and turned away.  And every day he would look at the bowl and turn away with the patient dignity of a Buddhist monk. Ray came in the kitchen day after to day to check.

“Has he eaten it yet?”

“No, Ray.”

Finally, even Ray had to give in. The day he came home from shopping for groceries with Relapse’s favorite brand of kibble, I knew the cat had won.  “Damn fool cat will probably starve himself to death,” Ray said gruffly, as he threw away the cheap food and refilled the bowl with the better brand.  After that, the cat got a lot more respect from Ray.

Some of the men didn't like him, but many of them did. Some of them found they could love the cat at a time when it was difficult to love themselves or anyone else, and they would sit stroking him for hours, or laughing as he chased a crumpled up paper ball u p and down the hallway. Some would object to a cat in the house at all. “I’m allergic to cats,” one of the new men said to Ray the day he was admitted. “That’s too bad,” Ray replied, “because the cat was here before you were.”

He was a peculiar cat in some ways. We all hoped he would be a good mouser, but Relapse had no interest in hunting rodents, and if he saw a mouse, he promptly hid under the bed. Squirrels either. There were plenty of squirrels living in the seven old pecan trees that ringed the house, and when one of them got inside, we all thought that Relapse would make short work of him. Relapse dove promptly under the bed and stayed there, until a couple of us herded the bewildered squirrel down the hallway and out the front door.

I wanted to take him to the vet to for shots and neutering, but Ray said it would cost too much. I reminded him that neutering would make the cat much less likely to spray in the house when he got older. That much Ray conceded. “Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll pick up the tab for getting him fixed, and you pay for the shots.”  The vet shook her head after Relapse’s preliminary screenings were finished. Her professional opinion was that it wasn't worth giving him any vaccinations.

 “This cat has feline leukemia,” She said. “Vaccinating him would be a waste of your money.”  “Humor me Doc,” She looked at me like I was crazy. “ This cat will probably not live out the year. It’s pointless.” “Let’s just give him the shots anyway,” I said. “I’ll pay for them.”  So she did.

Relapse stubbornly refused to die from his leukemia, and as I took him back to the vet year after year for his checkup, I couldn't resist ribbing her a little. “Yeah, Doc,” I said, eight years later. “This is the cat, you said wouldn't last a year!” We both laughed, and Relapse, who had grown into a big fine specimen, just lay on the exam table and purred. It's amazing how a little love and some care can help a cat (or a man) beat the odds.

That cat lived 13 years, and so entrenched himself into the daily life of the halfway house, that there are men who still ask about him and remember him to this day.

Time eventually ran out for ole Relapse, just as it must for all of us sooner or later. When he got so old and sick that all he could do was sleep and barely eat, one of the residents who had taken a shine to him took him into his room and tenderly nursed him through his last days until the end. Those of us who loved you, Relapse, salute you; for you were as much a resident of our halfway house as any human who ever walked through the door.

The job you love to hate but hate to leave…

“ I am like a man pursued by a bear,” said the prioress, “ and who carries twelve small children on his back, and a horsefly settles on his face. He might like to knock off the horsefly, but how can he? --For with both hands he supports the children, and if he stops to put the children down the bear will catch up with him.”  Sylvia Townsend Warner “The Corner That Held Them” 1948

What started as a temporary (I thought!) job as the house cook at Christian Fellowship Home has lengthened for me into a twenty year commitment to the place, and those twenty years have passed more quickly than I care to admit. There are jobs that enrich you, jobs that inspire you, and jobs that ennoble you; some people have even managed to find all three benefits in a single employment situation.  That’s definitely been the case for me here, although there have been enough “horseflies” and “bears” thrown in along the way to make it interesting! I can only conclude one thing – it takes a special kind of idiot to work at a halfway house.

A halfway house owned and operated by an individual may be different, but the ones that are sponsored by small local non-profit charitable organizations like ours depend primarily on funding and donations, and those can swell, ebb, and wane according to the circumstances of the community’s economy like tides under the phases of the moon. Some people actually think that there is money to be made in operating a halfway house, as one well-meaning but naive lady breathlessly told me over the phone one day. Her plan was to open a halfway house using nothing but available grant money, which she was convinced was abundantly plentiful and going begging -- unclaimed funding that was just hanging around unpicked like ripe fruit in an abandoned orchard. She was convinced too that the residents who came to her would all gladly contribute, paying their fees promptly and responsibly --and holding hands and singing Kumbaya as well I guess!

Reality check: the residents are probably the least reliable source of funding you can depend on. I mean, really, who comes out of treatment, or off a long disastrous binge with an improved credit score?

In most halfway house operations, money is in short supply. In spite of that, many people have the idea that working in one is a lucrative position that pays exorbitantly well. Our annual budget of slightly more than $100K earmarks approximately $45K for salaries and wages, and we have three employees. You do the math.

Finding the money to keep the lights on with is challenging enough, but dealing with the residents is just as challenging.  Very few end up at a halfway house because they want to be there. Most of us got there because we had absolutely no other viable alternative. When he first arrives, the new man is battling all sorts of devastating feelings about his recent addictive crisis and the consequences of it. That doesn’t always make for pleasant social interaction right off the bat, and is one reason that a lot of the newly recovered relapse in the first 90 days of new found sobriety. Then there’s what I call the “Thank you/screw you” complex. The first couple of weeks or months a resident is usually constantly sharing how glad he is to be there but later on nothing the house does suits him and gratitude has flown out the window.

And don’t be looking for a lot of positive strokes from the people you work for either, there aren’t many employee of the month appreciation award  programs at any of the halfway houses I know.  Your bosses, the board of directors, may not be practicing addicts and alcoholics, but they are sometimes going to bring the same amount of “personalities before principles” to the situation that the residents do!  To paraphrase the Conductor’s Lament:

            I do not get to drive the train,

            I cannot ring the bell,

            But let the dam thing jump the tracks

            And see who catches hell!” – author unknown

So why do I keep going to work day after day at this halfway house? There are several reasons. To see the light of sustainable recovery come in to the eyes of a man who was convinced it was impossible for him to get sober is a wonderful thing to experience. To share the daily task of staying sober and clean with other men who are facing the same challenges I am gives me the strength to endure.  To know that there would be a hole in the fabric of our community if the house disappeared (as several of the eastern North Carolina halfway houses already have) helps give me the determination to carry it forward. But for me, there’s an even more fundamental benefit from working here that I never found at any other place of employment--

It’s the only job I’ve ever had that I could stay sober doing.

Why good biscuits can be dangerous...

“You make cornbread for your husband, but biscuits for your man…” – “Clifford Blake, Sr. Calls the Cotton Press”.  Louisiana Folklife Center.  1980

Nightly supper at Christian Fellowship Home in the early 90’s was a collective affair. An old cow bell clanged promptly at 5 PM to announce it, and you had better show up for it, or at the least better had made some previous arrangements with the house manager for a saved plate if you were going to be home late from work, or you would miss it altogether.

In those days the house had to purchase all of its food, so the menus were plain but plentiful. Chicken quarters, pork shoulders, and hamburger meat were the usual staple main dish ingredients, with an occasional ham or turkey showing their roasted carcasses around the holidays. And the turkeys and hams were often as not donated. Meat and two vegetables, one of which was usually inexpensive dried beans, were offered up on the daily buffet table, accompanied by some kind of bread.

Our house manager had left the week before to take a better paying job at the halfway house in Selma, and John – our tobacco chewing ex-biker house cook -- had been promoted to manager. No new cook had been hired yet, so he was doing double duty in the kitchen. John was a recovering biker from the Outlaws club, and looked every bit the part. Every available inch of his visible skin was covered with tattoos, and some of the more spectacular “pieces” were on the parts normally covered by his clothes, like the picture of the nude female in high heels and fishnet stockings chained to a post that went from the base of his spine to up between his shoulder blades. He was a natural leader. It took a while for anyone to discover that beneath that frightening exterior was a noble and compassionate soul devoted to staying sober. Most of the men liked and respected him. Most of the time, I was terrified of him.

Now, John had a way with outdoor cooking, and on festive occasions when he would cook chicken or the occasional donated deer on the big black grill in the backyard, no one could match him or his made from scratch barbecue sauces. Inside the house kitchen it was another matter.  His wild free spirit seemed to be a little bit constrained between enclosed walls. He would grumble and fuss when things boiled over or burned, but he took the cook’s responsibilities seriously, even though he really didn’t enjoy it all that much, and he managed to produce a tolerable supper.

Except for his biscuits. Light bread in the house was reserved for the bologna sandwiches that we had every day for lunch. The cook was expected to alternate between corn bread and biscuits for supper. John’s cornbread was fair, but his biscuits were heavy, leaden, hockey puck like objects, hard on the outside and soggy on the inside.  They came out the oven pale and anemic looking, like Yankee tourists on the North Carolina beach in winter. They were the butt of many a house joke, and as they were passed around the dining room, many a resident shook their head and took one only as an uneaten courtesy before passing them on around, or declined them altogether.

“There’s something wrong with this stove,” John said to me as I chatted with him while he cooked supper one evening, “No matter how long I leave these biscuits in, they never get very brown.” One glance at the old six-burner gas range’s oven thermostat was enough to see why; it was set far too low. And the thirty minutes that John had spent with the rolling pin thumping, rolling, and re-rolling the dough was enough to account for their Playdoh brick like texture.

So one evening I decided to do him a favor. “Hey John,” I said “How about letting me make the biscuits tonight?” “Okay, why not?” he said. “Everything else is done and I’m ready for a break.” He went to the porch for a chew and left me in the kitchen.

I knew how to make biscuits. An old woman in Louisiana had taught me two valuable skills: how to drip chicory coffee and how to make biscuits. Miz Coutzee brooked no foolishness in her Cane River kitchen. Weak coffee was an anathema to her; she called it “merde d’hibou”, which was French for “owl shit.” “Good coffee must coat the spoon, Robair! If you can see the bottom of the cup it is not strong enough!” And poorly made biscuits were absolute heresy, as she remonstrated when she slapped my hand away from the rolling pin I was reaching for one day. “No, NO Robair! Rolling pins are for pie crust, never for biscuits!”

Piled in the middle of the flour dusted wooden kitchen worktable was her mound of soft, moist, slightly sticky dough. Formed from a loose and very gently mixed aggregate of soft Southern wheat self-rising flour – “ Only southern soft wheat, understand, Robair! The northern wheat is good for bread but too hard for biscuits!” – shortening and milk, gently coaxed to thickness with her flour covered fingers, and cut into rounds with an de-lidded empty tin can, they were rested with sides touching in a pan for a short time to rise, and then were put in a very hot oven for about 40 minutes.

Between Miz Coutzee’s kitchen mentoring and growing up on Masonboro Sound, where homemade quick breads were a staple of daily eating, I knew what a good biscuit was supposed to look like. Sadly, John’s fell far short of the ideal.

So I made the biscuits just as the old lady had shown me, cranked up the oven and just as the clock showed five, piled them, crusty and brown on the outside and softly steamed on the inside, on a big plate and took them into the dining room where John and the men were gathered.  The snickering began almost immediately

“Well now,” Slim, the old painter said, putting two biscuits on his plate.  “What’s this? This actually looks like a biscuit.”  “Yeah,” said Pops, the old high tider from Wanchese, “Think I can actually chew these without breaking my plates! Pass the syrup, please.” In the corner by the door, John was turning red. As the biscuit plate went around the room the jibes got bolder and bolder, and the laughter got louder and louder. “Call the Pope, it’s a miracle!” one man hollered.  “It’s the miracle of recovery!” the man who got the last biscuit cackled, and the room exploded in loud hilarity. John gave me a furious look, got up and stormed out of the dining room.

New and insecure in my place at the home, I felt awful. I hadn’t meant to show John up.  Would he kick me out over this? Where would I go? Leaving my supper plate untouched on the table I went to find John.

John was sitting in the dark on the porch rocking furiously.  Afraid to get too near, I called softly from the safety of the front door; “John, can I talk to you?”

“What is it?” he said sharply, not looking a bit in my direction.  I tentatively moved a little closer.

“Well, John, I’m sorry, I was only trying to help.”

“No, you weren’t. You were showing off. You made me look like a dam fool in there.”

The cannonball in the back of my throat dropped down into my stomach.  “I know I did John. Well, I…” And then I had one of those intuitive flashes that would serve me as guideposts in years of recovery to come.  Showboating was one of my major problems. Gifted by my Creator in a number of ways, I had usually used those abilities to make myself look and feel superior to others on many occasions. Not once did I pause to consider how John might feel if my biscuits came out better than his. Not once had I ever used my talents just to promote good and benefit others, it was always about me and how good I would look. It was plain I had a prideful arrogant streak in me a mile wide. So keenly did I regret at that moment the bonds of my customary arrogance that I wanted to crawl under a rock.  I carefully slid down into the porch rocker next to John.

“Look, I’m sorry John. Please forgive me. I…well…I just hope I can work on the arrogant attitude I’ve got. I’ve always had it. I can see that now. I don’t want you to kick me out over this. John, I’ve got nowhere else to go. Let me make it up to you. Whatever I can do to make it up to you, I’ll do.”

John looked away in disgust and spat a stream of chewing tobacco juice expertly over the front porch rail into the flowerbed.  We sat in silence for a few long moments. I fully expected to be told to pack up and leave.

“Waaaal,” he drawled, and eyed me critically up and down for an instant. “I’ll tell you what. You’re a good cook, there’s no doubt, those biscuits prove it, and with Jay gone, I got enough to do around here without having to cook too. So here’s how you can make it up. You take the cook’s job. It won’t pay much, but it’ll give you enough to pay your rent with a little left over. And every meal you cook can be your amends, and that’ll be fine with me. But…” and he leaned over and fixed me with his tough biker eyes so there could be no mistake, “ if you ever show me up like that again in front of the men, it’ll be your last day in this house.”

I nodded agreement in fear and relief. And that’s how I became the men’s home cook at Christian Fellowship Home.

Why can't you just get a dang JOB?

“Every morning about this time She gets me out of my bed a-crying Get a job After breakfast every day She throws the want ads right my way And never fails to say Get a job…” – The Silhouettes “Get A Job” 1957

A young probation officer stood on the front porch of the halfway house the other day, talking about one of the new men he had just dropped off from prison a few days before. “Is he doing okay?” he asked. “Is he out looking for work ?"

“He seems to be settling in okay,” I said. “Today he’s at outpatient counseling. He's put in some applications. He hasn't found anything yet.”

“He ought to get busy and go to work.”

“Well,“ I said, “Even if he really wants a job, sometimes being an ex-offender can hold a man back from getting one.”

“Bull!” was the quick and authoritative reply from the community corrections officer. “Anyone can find a job if they want to. He can find something.”

I didn't feel like arguing, so I kept my peace. But that’s the attitude I’ve run up against many times over the last twenty years. A lot of people don’t see addicts and alcoholics as sick people struggling with a fatal disease - they see them as fundamentally lazy people who, if they just got off their duffs and worked harder, then their disease wouldn't bother them so much.

My response to that, is, to quote my young friend from the probation office – “Bull!”

Addicts and alcoholics are some of the hardest working people on earth. You have to work hard to keep a severe addiction going. Think about it, an addict has to get up every day and achieve his goal of using in spite of every obstacle thrown in his way. It's a wrong, unhealthy goal to be sure, but it still requires skill, adaptability, and resourcefulness to achieve it. 

But just because you have the ability to achieve something, it doesn't mean that circumstances are going to allow you to achieve it. The two counties our halfway house serves have carried one of the highest unemployment rates in the state for the last four years.  Historically an agricultural based economy, our area has seen the collapse of the tobacco industry that once was the backbone of its prosperity.  A lot of the manufacturing jobs we did have were interrupted by a devastating flood in 1999, and never came back.

Circumstances like that make finding a good job very difficult, even for the best qualified applicants.  And men at a halfway house are not always the best qualified: they have spotty employment histories, a lot of them have criminal records, and many of them have interrupted educations. When the job market gets really tight, availability shifts upward to the more qualified and the economic “bottom feeders” get dropped entirely off the list. That’s why you have a lot of over qualified people in our area who are under-employed. They have to take what they can get.

And if you think that criminal convictions are no bar to employment, then I suggest you try an experiment. Go out and put in a few job applications yourself and be sure to list that you have a felony record. See how many call backs you get. That probation officer I was talking to would have never been hired with one.

Getting and keeping a good job is important, but it’s not the whole solution to long lasting recovery either.  When the office phone rang this morning, I talked with a young professional woman whose father is an addict who had been a resident at the halfway house a little while back.  Her father had been working hard, had two jobs, had been putting in 16 hour days,  had his own place, things had been going well. Then a bad relapse, very serious legal charges, he was in jail, he was back to square one, with no place to go.  She was frantic and didn't know what to do.  The bitter truth is that employment alone won’t keep you clean and sober.

Abstinence, spiritual development, work, personal responsibility – these are the primary tools that men at our halfway house are supposed to use to get closer to a good life in recovery. And even if they haven't found a paying job yet, they still work, every man in our house works. They work at keeping up the house and grounds.  They work as volunteers for any number of service projects that we do. They work as individual volunteers for other non-profits in our town. They work as volunteers in the churches they attend. They work when they take whatever cash paying side jobs they can get. And above all, they work the difficult daily task of staying clean and sober.

There are men, of course, who have no intention of going to work, men who will always just look for a free ride and the easy way out. Of such men, my ex-boss used to wryly observe: “Ex-Lax wouldn't work that guy.”

But there are men who truly want to work and get frustrated at the way the deck seems to be stacked against them.  I tried to comfort one such resident the other day; he’d been turned down, -yet again - for a job he had applied for. He was so sure he had aced the interview, they had invited him back for another meeting, he really liked the company, all was on go, he thought.  Then came the background check and the dreaded turn down.

In a perfect world, where everyone who wanted a job could get and keep a good one, that probation officer might have been right. The way it is around here however, the true measure of a man's worth can't be heavily based just on whether he's employed or not. 

20 years of reflections from a halfway house porch...

In the late summer of 1993, a desperate, broken 41 year old man stood on the front walk of a small North Carolina halfway house and paused uncertainly.

Touching his arm gently, the pretty young Vocational Rehabilitation counselor who had brought him there from the state supported treatment center, encouraged him. "Go on in." she said. "They are expecting you."

Too scared to say it out loud, he thought to himself "I doubt it. There's not a soul in this world who'd be glad to see me coming up the front walk" He held the cardboard Pepperidge Farm Danish box a little tighter. It held the used clothing they'd been kind enough to give him from the clothes closet at the center.  On his feet were a stiff pair of new tennis shoes.  A fellow patient had gotten a home visit pass from the facility and bought them for him at the Dollar General out of pity, because he had arrived at the treatment center barefoot. With no socks, the stiff shoes had rubbed his heels a little raw.

"Come on," Gail said, and  led him up the scuffed peeling paint concrete steps to the porch.

She rang the doorbell and he looked around the porch. It was an old, two story wood framed house that had definitely seen better days. He noticed that through the modern vinyl siding you could still see some reminders of the fancy moldings and casings that testified to the house's original glory days. Just the kind of old house he had always had a dream of owning and fixing up.  And that was just one of  his many broken dreams, most of which had been lost in the nightmare of his out of control drinking and the crack addiction and the nightmare spiraling all the way down to living on the street homeless, eating out of dumpsters, and doing the things necessary to get through those last terrible days. Things he really didn't want to remember.

Suddenly he felt panicked. No, it really couldn't have come down to this for him, could it? Not him, not with all the potential of his younger days, and all those hopes and plans, all that talent and ability and intelligence, come to naught, and the mark that he was sure he was going to make on the world, the dreamed of successes, and the golden nugget vision of what his life would be that  he'd always carried inside like a secret, hidden jewel -- all that come to this? Standing like a beggar at the door of this run down looking halfway house hoping for charity? He felt like he was going to throw up.

The only thing that kept him standing there waiting for someone to answer the door was Gail's quick sympathetic glance. "It's okay, Kirk. They can help you here. Trust me.' Since he couldn't trust himself any more, he felt the only thing he could do was to trust her.

A tall, stern looking man opened the front door. "Welcome,' he said, "to Christian Fellowship Home."