As you are reading this story imagine a kind looking older man. You can tell he has lived a lot of life by the gruffness of his voice, the way he has to pick through his thoughts and memories as he expresses himself and then the deep belly laugh of acceptance peppered, in between paragraphs and feelings of his talk.

Bob is my dog walker, pet and house sitter when I am away. He stays in our home and I trust this man. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat animals and Bob is very kind to creatures. He never has a mean thing to say about my dog, Pearl, or my three cats. Stubby Wubby (our older black cat) sidles up to him often during this conversation because he knows Bob is a soft touch.

Bob was watching my home last November when he called me in Oklahoma to tell me that Mason, my beagle dog was doing poorly. Like, this might be the end for him and believed Mason had another stroke. It was one of the hardest messages to hear and I know one of the hardest calls Bob had to me. He called Katie (my oldest daughter) and her husband, Chris, because they had a car and the capabilities to take Mason to the Emergency Pet Hospital on that Sunday. I had a grey wool blanket that Bob and Chris placed Mason in to carry him into the car.

From there, Grant and I  thought of ways to get me back to Seattle and what we could do to save Mason. Then we Skyped with Katie, Ame, and Sam who were at the emergency clinic with Mason. He was our family dog, and it was natural for all three girls to go to his aid. The Emergency Vet then talked and said Mason was in too much pain to consider continuing his life. Necessary life procedures would cost twenty thousand, and most likely he wouldn’t survive.  We, as a family made the choice to put Mason out of his misery. We said goodbye to our beloved Mason beagle dog, and with one shot, he was gone. The tears flowed freely that day in sorrow and grief and for many days after that. Bob understands this pet love and cares for your pets as if they are his own.

I wanted to have Bob tell his story because life is a strange one for all of us. For some people, we don’t know what our soul purpose is until our later years. Finding Bob’s soul purpose came later on in life because he was born to be a pet walker and I, for one, am glad he is.

I FOUND JOY

Chapter One:

Hoodlum

In my younger days, I was on the streets by choice. Homeless, I mean. I was seventeen. I was out traveling around. Even when I was moving around, I would usually find some place to make a little bit of money, a place to stay for a few days, a week or whatever. I even stayed in a commune down in San Francisco for awhile, and that was interesting.

I can’t say it was a result of it, but I have to wonder if it didn’t have some influence on my traveling around but in my real younger days I went through two foster homes, and a group home and I almost went to prison.

Beth:    How did that happen?

A deep belly laugh and pause.

Bob:    I was out robbing houses to support my drug habit which was anything and everything.

Beth:    Were you always in a foster home?

Bob:    No. The first one I was in was over in Eastern Washington. I was there for three or four months, maybe a little bit longer. It was a dairy farm. I sometimes still kick myself in the butt because the people on the dairy farm were absolutely wonderful. It was hard work.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

You had to get up at four or five in the morning and go out and feed the cows and then come back and milk them.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

When you came in for breakfast when you were done with all of that it was like

  a four-course meal.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

And they were fantastic people.  I wished I had stayed because it was a good life.

Chapter Two:

I Was Born In Seattle

I was born and raised in Seattle. I got to Eastern Washington by way of The System.

That would be The Welfare System.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

I knew my real family and lived with them until my teens. I started out as a hoodlum about thirteen or fourteen years of age. I got in so much trouble that my parents finally took me to juvenile court and said, “We don’t know what to do with him. You try something.”

A deep belly laugh and pause

I did this because I wanted the drugs. I started out with a beer or a bottle of wine when I was thirteen, and it just progressed from there. Somebody introduced me to pot and so on and so forth. My consumption was immense.

Beth:    Were your parents like this?

Bob:    No. My mother didn’t even drink.

A deep belly laugh and pause. 

Bob:    She was diabetic and couldn’t drink.

Beth:    Let’s fast forward. Did you ever resolve your issues with your parents?

Bob:    I think with my Mom more so than my Step-Dad. I was able to spend the   last couple years of Mom’s life with her. And she got to see me get   sober and stay that way. I’ve been sober for 30 years now.

Beth:    That’s pretty damn great. Congratulations.

All of the family members at one point were just scratching their heads and going,

“What happened to Bob?”

At that time, I didn’t know how to explain it.  I have two sisters. I’m closest to my older sister. She was like my best buddy. On the other hand, my younger sister and I always had a little bit of friction.

Beth:    If you could explain it now, how would you tell it?

Bob:    I’m not sure. I’ve talked with both my sisters. They know I’m sober now.

   And they’ve seen a lot of changes that have happened so I’ve tried to explain it to them the best I could. I kind of leave it at that.

Beth:    It sounds like you had an addiction problem.

A deep belly laugh and pause

Bob:   That’s putting it mildly.

Chapter Three:

The Army

Beth:    Some people have that addiction gene. It’s not a fun gene when it  expresses itself. So when did you decide to go into the army?

Bob:    I went in, 1976. Part of it was that I saw an ad in the paper that said, “Earn while  you learn.“

A deep belly laugh and pause.

I wasn’t making a whole bunch of money at the time so I just kind of figured the heck with it.

Being young and rebellious as I was I tore up my draft card. I was ready to head to Canada or disappear somewhere a few years before I signed up.  And that’s

funny because I joined a couple of years later.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

I was still drinking and doing drugs in the army.

To a degree, it’s true that if you join the army, you get drugs. The alcohol was more available than the drugs. When I got over to Germany, we had a pop machine that had four different selections of beer in it.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

,   

We were stationed about three blocks away from the local brewery. There was hash and meth available. That came pretty close to doing me in.

With meth, I would usually snort it. A lot of people do inject it, and some probably smoke it. My thing was putting it up my nose. It wound me up.

A deep belly laugh and pause.     

I was more hyper and more internally ordered when I did drugs. I say it almost did me in because I would drink and do the meth and then go out and jog ten miles.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

I’m lucky my heart didn’t explode.

I was in the army three years. I didn’t learn a trade in the military. They had me in what they called, stock control in accounting where you maintain inventory on any tank equipment and things like that. It was a lot of time in the office.

The Army was so desperate to get people in that I believe; they falsified my test results to an extent. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was dyslexic.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

A lot of stuff would come out backwards but I learned how to cover that up so nobody ever knew.

I didn’t get anything out of doing that particular work. What I did get out of the military was a certain amount of discipline and structure. And I could have gotten a college degree with the GI Bill if I had not continued to party. I went to college for a short period. I would study two to three hours a night but then if I went out and drank, then all of that studying tanked.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

The only class I got a good grade in was physical conditioning.

Chapter Four:

Still Drinking & Doing Drugs

I was still doing the drugs and the drinking, but I started traveling more. I’ve seen most of the United States close to three times and maybe missed a place here and there.

        A deep belly laugh and pause.

I didn’t become homeless until I sobered up.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

Chapter Five:

Sober & Homeless

I ended up inheriting my mom’s house, up over in the Greenwood area. This place is just a few blocks away from where I’m living now.

I was awful with money back then, and I managed to keep it for about three years.

Then I ended up selling it to my neighbors.

First I bought a little pick-up truck and that went out on me. Then I got a Volkswagen Van and lived in that because I didn’t have any other place to live at during that time. 

A deep belly laugh and pause.

When I got the van, I also bought an espresso cart. I would park it where the espresso cart was. I’d get up in the morning, open the espresso cart up and serve espresso to people.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

The cart was next to a laundromat so people could throw their laundry in the washer machine and come out and get a latte. It went okay for six months, but I hadn’t done enough research as far as the competition was concerned. There were a lot of coffee shops popping up even back then. I had to move to a different location. I was alone and had no support, so it just fell apart. By the time I sold the espresso cart, I was lucky if I was pulling in twenty-five bucks a day.

By then, I had pretty much gone through the money I had gotten from the sale of my Mom’s house. So I decided to head towards Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I lived there close to a year and then decided to come back up to Seattle.

Chapter Six:

Back To Seattle

Unbeknownst to me, while I was in New Mexico, I had gotten sick. By the time I came back to Seattle, I had dropped an incredible amount of weight. By the time the docs figured out what was going on with me at the hospital, I was down to 125 pounds.

It turned out that my thyroid had gone hyper on me. My cholesterol was in the gray zone. I had no body fat. It was bad. The way they explained it to me is that I was starving myself  to death. I could eat all day but the food would go straight through me. They used radioactive iodine and destroyed the thyroid and so now I take thyroid medication.

I have a kind of twisted sense of humor, but I still chuckle about the fact that they took me in this room to give me the iodine and the Geiger counter on the wall pegged me as radioactive. The doc jokingly said, “just don’t pee on the grass cause you’ll kill it.”

A deep belly laugh and pause.

I still take the thyroid medication, and it helps to keep me between 160 and 170 pounds which is a comfortable weight for me. There was a time when they were trying to figure out the proper dosage for me, and I had gotten up to two hundred pounds. That was uncomfortable. I could feel the stress on my knees and other joints.

Chapter Seven:

Getting Sober

I went up to Alaska on a crabbing boat. I just hitched a ride with the fishermen. I did some of the preparation work before they went crabbing but I didn’t go crabbing with them. For money I would go out and shovel snow off peoples’ roofs and worked at restaurants for money.

I got sober in 1988 up in Fairbanks. And I’m going there April 12th to have a reunion with my AA buddies.

I worked in restaurants off and on for close to twenty years or better. I started out at nine years old. We lived right next door to a restaurant and mom would go over and do the prep work. I’d go over and help her. I’d peel the potatoes and cut them for french fries.

That’s something (up until ten years ago) I knew I could always fall back on for work. I could walk into a restaurant, and usually, someone would have just walked out, and I’d get the job. I was a prep cook, dishwasher, and line cook.

I was homeless a few more times but not for long. I like having a little bit of money in my pocket.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

So I’d always find some kind of work. The jobs would last for three months or a year.

When I finally got the diagnosis of the thyroid I was homeless. I was sleeping with a friend of mine’s tool shed. I slept in a few parks around the area. I had my dog with me, Rosie who I got in 1993.  She hitchhiked with me from Seattle to Santa Fe and back with me.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

One of the few pleasant things about my thyroid business was – one of the nurses who was helping me, before I got let out of the hospital, hands me an envelope and in it, was 75 dollars. Her name was Bessie, and that’s how my cat ended up being called Bessie.

I got into a laborer’s union and got hooked into a really good job for three months. So I bought an extended body van and had a futon set up in it  and everything. Rosie and I were living in that. One of the people I would do work for periodically had a rental house that was empty so I got to stay in that for a little bit. It was just prior before she rented it again when I came across Bessie in her garage behind the house.   I just started leaving little dishes of food for her and she figured out I was okay. Bessie became my cat.

At first, Bessie didn’t know what to think about Rosie, but Rosie was just a gentle soul, and they became the best of friends. They’d curl up and sleep together. They’d go for walks together. There would be a few times when people would come up behind me  and say, “you know, that cat’s following you” and I’d say, “ I know, we’re buddies, we’re fine.”

A deep belly laugh and pause.

I ended up living in that van close to two years. The woman let me park it by her house ended up coming up with a different place that was available, and so I rented that out. I worked it out with her so I would paint some of her rentals and stuff in exchange for the rent or at least get something taken off the price. That worked out.

I think I messed up my back pretty bad so I wasn’t able to climb up and down ladders anymore. After that, it was pretty much continually moving from one place to another.

A deep belly laugh and pause.

I rented from an elderly woman. She ended up not charging me any rent. I would help her do her laundry, take her to the grocery store or whatever. She was 88 years old, and it got to the point that the house she lived in was too big for her to take care of any more so she ended up at the Ida Culver House. The family sold the house, and I had to find another place to live.

I started walking a woman’s two dogs for a job. She had the downstairs entirely remodeled and told me I could move in there and that way if she had to go out of town I could easily walk her dogs. She frequently went out of town, and that was where I started becoming a dog walker. It was a great place because other people found out about me and I walked their dogs too. I had the whole downstairs and a huge backyard that backed up behind a miniature forest behind her house.

I was there for 2-3 years before she sold the house. I was in my prime at this place. I had a truck to pick up the dogs I sat for and walked, or people would bring them to me.

The next place was in The University District. The landlord was a man. He was also a jerk who stiffed me out of my security deposit for no reason. That’s when I was homeless again which was about three years ago.

I’m surprised by this because I knew Bob three years ago.  I knew Bob because he was the dog walker for my daughter’s dog, Jasper. Bob walked Jasper from the time he was a pup in 2009 until Jasper died, of natural causes in the summer of 2015.  When I needed a  dog walker and Pet sitter in the fall of 2015, Bob was available for the job.

Bob:    Fortunately I have a lot of friends who work at Beth’s Cafe, and so they took turns making sure I was okay because it was during the winter.

I took early social security three years ago at age 62 because money was sketchy.

And then I got into the place I’m in now – a boarding house with six other guys. No animals are allowed. I miss having my Rosie and Bessie around, so dog walking, cat and house sitting help me feel like I have pets. Dog sitting has evolved because of word-of-mouth.

I’ll be a dog sitter as long as I can so between social security and walking the dogs I live a pretty good life.

A deep belly laugh and pause.