$40,000 a year to live in a nursing home facility. That's what the financial report on Monday Morning's NPR morning news said. The poor can't pay this and their Social Security can't cover it so the Government pays the facility the difference. Social Security is charactorized as the most successful retirement plan in history, but I don't know anyone who can live on Social Security. I have a relative who worked for many years at fairly good jobs paying $50,000 a year. She's getting a little over a thousand a month now. There is no way she can live on that., and due to a catastrophic hospitalization she was stripped of her savings. There are a lot of people like her- they are getting social security, they have little in the way of savings and they can' pay rent and buy food on their social security. The minute they get dragged into court and evicted the solution is to get them into a "home" where it costs $40,000 a year to keep them- but the government won't come up with the extra $300 monthly to keep them in their own apartment. Visiting a friend in a facility I saw what she gets to eat- canned green beans, a cup of clear orange gelatine, a white roll and a pat of margerine, some kind of creamed chicken thing on a half cup of white rice...What normal person would want that to look forward to for the rest of their life? There was also a salad- a leaf of iceberg lettuce with a hard slice of tomato with a dab of orange salad dressing. Most people would be much happier in their own homes with a little extra money to get their own food. I guarantee you they won't be eating any half cups of orange gelatine and white iceberg lettuce. Isn't it cheaper to goive someone an extra $500 a month so they can pay rent and eat than to pay a nursing home $3500 a month to keep them in a place where they must share a room, give up most of their own possessions, and eat institutional food for the rest of their life?

"Enjoy your day"... This little saying has migrated from someplace in the islands to New York City. The first time I heard it was from a client from Jamaica. We'd get together to talk, and at the end of the appointment, as we parted, he'd give me a wide smile and say "Enjoy your day." I next heard it from a woman at some City Agency after we completed some complicated transaction- she gave me the same dazzling smile as we parted and said "Enjoy your day." Now I'm starting to hear it around the neighborhood- the laundromat, in the copy shop, here and there. I don't know what island it come from, but I want to go there. It carries much more good will than "Good Day," which is too curt, or "Good bye " "Good Afternoon,"" Good Evening" "Chow", and all the other parting statements. "Enjoy your day " is like a reminder of what life is all about- we are here to enjoy time, to savor the hours, to take time for a walk in the park, to stop on the way home to pick up shrimp, to sit and read a book, or look at art.

Social Security Debate... What we really need in this country is a good poor person lobby. One composed of independent poor and disabled persons who can talk about what their life is really like, and how they are mangled by services set up to help them How come in all the Social Security talk I haven't heard one word about Social Security Disability, Medicaid, Medicare, and Nursing Homes? It is a true fact that if you are poor, disabled, and over 50, the present system shoves you into a nursing home the minute your situation becomes destabilized with a medical problem or housing issues. Rather than give a person on disability an increase so they can pay their rent or find an apartment, and an Aide to come in to assist them, they are summarily carted off to a "Facility." The Facility gives them a nice bed in a little shared room where they can't have their own things, and it's usually in a place far from home where their old friends can't easily visit. The facility takes over their disability payments, and since it isn't enough to pay for all the "services" the person is getting, they turn to the government for additional money. Facilities must have good lobbyists, because they seem to get the laws passed to keep the money flowing. I once had a client, a 94 year old man who went to Tompkins Square park every day to socialize with his old friends in the neighborhood. They would sit on the park benches together speaking Polish, remembering the old country, and go to the Odessa coffeshop for dinner. Then he had a minor stroke and was taken to the hospital. Next thing we knew, he was moved out to Queens, way-out past the subway lines, and shoved into a facility. There was a lawsuit in progress about their club house on 8th Street, so I drove one of his friends out to see him and to confer about the lawsuit. The facility was a big place on a bare field, built of yellow brick, with windows that didn't open, and wide corridors paved with cold blue linoleum tiles. We found him in the second floor lounge and he looked miserable. He felt like he was in jail. No park, no friends, no polish coffee shop every day for dinner. They wouldn't let him come home to his apartment where he had lived for 40 years because it didn't have a shower. Fortunately, he had a room mate taking care of the rent. So one of the young club members got together the room mate and the landlord, and together they put an accessible shower in so he could come home.

February Orange... On my way home from church on Sunday I biked up Central Park West about 1 pm. The Park walkways, the sidewalks, and the street were jammed with folks that turned out to see "The Gates" draped over 23 miles of Central Park's walks. Over on Columbus Avenue the restaurants were filled with out of town brunchers. The side streets were packed with their out of state SUVs and the bike paths blocked with double parkers. I heard on NPR that over a million people visited the Park on Sunday- some kind of a record in February, even for a sunny Sunday. I like The Gates better in yesterday afternoon's misty weather, or in the twilight at sunset. They lend themselves to a gray day, adding a secret layer of not too bright orange fluttering throughout Central Park's muted winter paths. In the bright Sunday at high noon, they looked traffic cone orange, too bright, too effusive against the digitally accessorized crowds, too loud, too crude, too New York.

NY trash... I saw one of my "positive" clients from the infamous Hotel Malibu on the street yesterday selling chatchkes and tapes in front of the Chase Bank. His rent is paid by the City... $2490 a month for a 9 X 6 room without its own bathroom or kitchen. They throw in a small refrigerator for his medication. Meanwhile, he gets a small amount of walking around money for food and everything else. I was looking at all this stuff laid down by him and the other two venders. Little carved statues and ceramic ware, clay pots, pewter ware, pictures and picture frames, ornate woven straw place mats, baby clothing, strange kitchen implements and pots, small boxes with drawers, tapes, and used books. The gleanings from New York City trash. I flashed on this idea - nothing sells on the street for more than $5.00 here, but most of this stuff would fetch better prices on ebay, and would not be confiscated by the New York City Police Department. What we need is a homeless ebay network to redistribute the gleanings from New York City trash to the rest of the country! Homeless guys with wifi laptops could skim off the good stuff out of the trash and go on line at Bryant Park, or one of the other free access sites in the city, and sell their stuff on the web for better money than they could get on the street. Paypal would deposit the money directly into their bank account. Although most people don't like to admit it many of the homeless, or marginally housed persons like my clients, are not any crazier than the rest of the population- they are just people who fell out their support network of job , friends and apartment. Some of them have substance abuse problems, but a lot of employed people with jobs have the same type of problem, but have never had the bad luck of getting sick for a while, losing in housing court, or being arrested. Many of the housed people I know are just about three paychecks away from homelessness. Give them a serious illness, or even a flu that goes on for a couple of months, and they could be homeless.

Looking for work... Ever since 9/11, paying clients are more scarce. Of course, I could always fall back on my career as a gifted opera singer, or invest in a sure fire pyramid scheme. Or... I could find a regular job with a paycheck doing what I do anyway - representing people in a jam. So today I went for my first job interview in about 10 years. It's a not-for-profit type place, the kind that I applied to massively after getting out of law school and passing the bar. They are very active in a lot of interesting projects and missions, and it seems like the type of place I could do something interesting and good. I get there and am doing OK, not too overbearing ( I hope), and then the interviewer, a girl from Buffalo who is younger than my son, asks me the trick question "where do you expect to be in five years, what are your long term goals?" Now, when you get to be a certain age, this is the type of question that tends to throw you. Should I say the truth? "I'll probably be dead, or marginalized as an old person", or should I invent some lofty goal on the spot- "My long term goal is to be elevated to the Supreme Court", or "I expect to be working on a book while serving time for civil disobedience." Once you reach a certain age, long term goals and five year plans become superfluous. They have their place when you are young, to sort of whip up your enthusiasm and get you off the couch, but as life continues, experience teaches that you should do as much as you can right now and do it as well as possible, because this may be as good as it gets. I'm not good at this, I stammered something about retirement and working as long as possible and then helpfully added, "but I may be dead."

Values in the Shrubbery...People coming out of the voting booths in the "heartland" gave "personal values" as their biggest reason for voting in the shrub. What are these personal values the heartland voted for? Definition of marriage? How is gay marriage threatening to straight people? No one is forcing people into same sex marriages. A few years ago, the best Mother in Barry's class was the gay transvestite uncle. Permitting women a choice? Why are unborn unconscious lumps of cells more important to us than living breathing children living in poverty? Where are the heartland's moral values when we kill 100,000 of our fellow human beings as they sleep, eat, or go about their daily business over in Iraq? Many more people died over there from our war than would have died under Sadam. Then there's our young people over there fighting a useless war. Isn't their life worth more than an unconscious clump of cells? And, how come these people don't come out against the death penalty? People are sitting on death row who were represented by a real estate attorney, or an attorney who fell asleep during their trial. Where are their personal values then? And. how about the 50% of all children in our country who live in poverty? How about those children from families without health care who are living in poverty even though both parents are working? How come those living children don't rate the same priority enjoyed by the unborn? Although I go to Church, attend retreats once a year, and serve as a trustee, I have no illusions that my actions are endorsed by God. I don't even know if there is a God. As an attorney living in New York City I do not have any "personal" values. Here, we just labor away in the darkness, trying to love our neighbor and do good works.