Lambs to the Slaughter - Key West
Received this email from someone in Alabama, my home state. Maybe we knew each other once, her name seems vaguely familiar through the ageheizmers.
Dear Former Homeless Person?
Sloan,
How in the hell did you become homeless as wealthy as you are? I can’t wrap my mind around that phenomenon.
Someone in Birningham
I only noticed this writer’s email after reading this morning’s Key West Citizen (keysnews.com) and the The Associated Press homeless article on page 5A, which describes a mushrooming national homeless phenomenon that just may change the face of America as it progresses.
Because of my deceased father and his business, Golden Flake Snack Foods, Inc., headquartered in Birmingham, and my father’s former close ties to Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, who advertised Golden Flake’s products on his Sunday afternoon TV replay show of the previous day’s game, my family is well known in Birmingham where Judith’s appraisal firm shows one of its Alabama offices is located. It is assumed by most people in Birmingham who know or know of me that I am wealthy, therefore. So Judith’s question probably is one many Birmingham people probably ask themselves. My question is, how did the Birminghan writer learn I was homeless? I suppose through my writings which went online and onto the Web, but perhaps she heard of it from someone who knows me. I’ll send her a copy of this post, which includes my answer, as it is, which she can pass around if she wishes.
I wrote about why and how I became homeless in HABITAT FOR HUMANITY: Snapshots of a pilgrims travels with God, which I recently published uncopyrighted and gratis to the file by that name in the menu of the home pages of goodmorningkeywest.com and goodmorningfloridakeys.com. I then re-published the book, one chapter at a time, nine chapters in all, along with other narrative, to the Today’s Cock-a-doodle Doo file of goodmorningkeywest.com and the Today’s FlaKey Drivel file of goodmorningfloridakeys.com. I’m not sure I feel up to telling the entire mostly grisly tale again, but I will summarize it.
First, it became clear to me by the latter half of the 1980s that something was preventing me from making money, which troubled me to no end. Second, I was getting by, by living off an inheritance from my father’s father, which also troubled me to no end. Third, a situation developed in my third marriage that resulted in my feeling like God wanted me to offer my wife the power to determine what, if any, part of my own assets I would walk away with if she and I went apart. My wife was overseas when this notion came to me out of the blue, and I prayed on it for the entire three weeks remaining in her trip, to see if I was simply hearing things or making it all up in my mind. I repeatedly asked to be told if I was not supposed to do this, and I never heard no or to forget about it. So, when she returned to the States I told her about it and we wept together. When about two years later she told me that she wanted time apart from me, I asked her to make the property division. She was reluctant but I pushed her and she made it. About $900,000 in cash securities and a home paid for free and clear went to her, along with a farm she had inherited from her mother in Pennsylvania, after I paid the estate taxes and lawyer’s fee for handling the estate. About $135,000 in cash securities and the equity in a life insurance policy on my father went to me. When that money ran out several years later, I was homeless. When my father passed over in 2005, I inherited, as did all of his children, $1,000,000 cash, and when the estate settled on Valentine’s Day 2006, I was no longer homeless. I and my siblings stand to inherit another $1,000,000 cash when my father’s widow passes over. With my inheritance I purchased a used Toyota Highlander and a single-wide trailer and about an acre of land on Little Torch Key, and gave a good bit of it to a woman who’d been put under my wing, the only person I knew or know having much the same kind of time with God I am having; and the rest I kept, except for parts of it I spent not particularly extravagantly on myself and parts I was moved to give to other people from time to time. The Little Torch property was bought at the top of the market and now probably is worth about one-half what I paid for it. Fortunately, I paid cash, so there is no mortgage to worry about. I have no debt other than taxes on the property and what little I owe the IRS each year. I still am prevented from making money, which still troubles me to no end. I can make minimum wage, washing dishes or cutting grass, but my health would not permit me to do it full-time. So but for the inheritance I received in 2006, I’d still be homeless, I suppose.
I return to the beginning, to The Associated Press article on page 5A of today’s Key West Citizen. I recommend that people try to wrap their minds, and their hearts, around that phenomenon, instead of worrying about me or that I once was homeless or may be homeless again. I hope I’m wrong, but I won’t be surprised if America sees a rise in its homeless roles that causes the land of the free and the home of the brave to start to resemble a third world country. People like the Birminghan writer may well end up being homeless themselves. People like the government officials and police described in The Associate Press article, who harrass and arrest and make homeless people criminals just for being homeless may well end up being homeless themselves. We have thousands of homes and condominiums for sale in the Keys. We have thousands of property owners whose mortgages have gone upside down, that is, the mortgage amount exceeds the value of the property. We have thousands of delinquent mortgages in the Keys. This phenomenon is nationwide. It sort of reminds me of the very first book I wrote, based on my experiences as a real estate closing attorney in Birmingham: HOMEBUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter? And it sort of reminds me of my pilgrimage with God, in which I was slaughtered; being homeless was just a very small piece of it.
Sloan Bashinsky