A Patron Saint

I’ve mentioned a few times that I have been moonlighting as a parking valet for several months. All in all it’s been a pretty good gig. I’ve lost weight, maintained some level of fitness, and made money. Most valets make their money through tips. That means a good night is determined by the number of people we park and how well they are willing to tip us. On a good night, we run our asses off and make $20 to $25/hr. On a bad night we might stand around, freeze our asses off, and make $4/hr. You can imagine that we spend a fair amount to energy trying to handicap whether our scheduled nights are going to be good or bad. Some things are easy to predict. It is a sure bet that the latter part of the week is better than the first part of the week. It’s also a lock that the Friday before a home football game will be busy. Beyond these basic patterns, it can be hard to predict whether particular nights will be good or bad. A good night means good money and a bad night leaves us wondering if there isn’t a better way to spend our time.

Now I am not Catholic or even particularly religious, but it got me wondering if there wasn’t a patron saint of valets. Hell, I’ll take help from any quarter if it means I can keep from wasting my time…or at least know whether or not I can ride my bike 40 or 50 miles on the day I valet. As I usually do, I turned to the source of all knowledge—Google. It turns out that it is hard to find a patron saint specifically devoted to parking valets. Here are a few of the saints that are in the ballpark:

Saint Christopher (Martyred ca. 251)
This guy has a pretty good story. He was 7.5 feet tall with a scary face. He served the King of Canaan, but left him to serve the devil when he learned the king was afraid of the devil. He eventually learned that the devil feared Christ, so he went looking for Christ. He found a hermit who convinced him to help people cross a river in service of Christ and ended up helping the man himself (as a child) cross that river. He eventually was martyred by a pagan king after sticking up for some other Christians. The king tried to tempt Christopher with money and harlots, but he refused it all—and even convinced the harlots to choose martyrdom. After trying several times to kill him, the pagans chopped off his head—Buster bad ass.
He is the patron saint of lots of things including travelers and drivers of all kinds of vehicles from buses to taxis to boats. Interestingly, he also is patron saint of fruit dealers, epileptics, gardeners, bachelors, archers and Havana, Cuba—interesting company we keep.

I found a couple of different prayers to Christopher. Here is the Roman Catholic version:

Dear Saint, you have inherited a beautiful name - Christbearer - as a result of a wonderful legend that while carrying people across a raging stream you also carried the Child Jesus. Teach us to be true Christbearers to those who do not know him. Protect all drivers who often transport those who bear Christ within them. Amen.

This is how the Eastern Orthodox play it:

Thou who wast terrifying both in strength and in countenance, for thy Creator's sake thou didst surrender thyself willingly to them that sought thee; for thou didst persuade both them and the women that sought to arouse in thee the fire of lust, and they followed thee in the path of martyrdom. And in torments thou didst prove to be courageous. Wherefore, we have gained thee as our great protector, O great Christopher.

I kind of like this guy.

Saint Frances of Rome (1384-1440)
She was married with she was 12, had 4 kids and then became a widow. She served the sick and the poor, guided by an archangel who led her way with a headlight-like lantern. Interestingly, she recorded 97 visions in which she saw the many pains of hell—good stuff I’m sure. On her feast days priests bless cars and drivers, but the prayer you say to her doesn’t mention cars and drivers. In addition to being the patron saint of cars and drivers, she’s also the patron saint of Roman housewives and people ridiculed for the piety. I’m thinking St. Christopher is a better bet.

Sebastian of Aparicio (1502-1600)
This guy is also known as the Angel of Mexico…because he lived in Mexico. He was a gentleman’s valet, worked on a farm, and built a road from Mexico City to Zacatecas and delivered mail on it. Eventually he became a wealthy man, but he gave all his money away and ended his life begging for alms. This dude was hard core--he was married twice for over 60 years and never consummated either marriage. He performed over 300 miracles in his life. I couldn’t find a specific prayer to be said to Sebastian, but I like his blue collar vibe.

Saint Zita (1212-172)
She was a faithful servant of a wealthy family in Tuscany. She viewed her servitude as service to God. At first, she was hated by her fellow servants and her masters, but eventually worked her way to running the household. One story tells of how she left her job baking bread for her masters to help a sick person and angels covered for her, baking the bread while she tended to the sick. She is credited with 150 miracles. Here is a cool tidbit. She died in 1272 and when they dug her back up in 1580 she hadn’t decayed—too holy. She was mummified and now you can go see her preserved like Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger at Basilica di San Frediano in Lucca. She is the patron saint of domestic servants, homemakers, lost keys, people ridiculed for their piety, rape victims, single laywomen, waiters, and waitresses. I love the fact that she didn’t rot, but her connection to cars, drivers, etc. is pretty tenuous.

Saint Ithafanuthia
This is the Greek patron saint of parking. Apparently people in Greece today still say a prayer to Ithafanuthia. Not much to go on with this one.

Saint Otto
OK, so I found this one on Amazon.com. After exhaustive research I discovered that Saint Otto is not really the patron saint of parking. He actually protects against hydrophobia, rabies, and mad dogs. But he does have a fresh, citrus scent. Considering the many smells I’ve encountered in cars—ranging from pot to crab cakes to ass and feet—the citrus scent might be nice.

Conclusion
Although I kind of liked Christopher and Sebastian, the only thing I can conclude is that there really is no patron saint out there to help valets insure good nights. I guess I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing—attracting success with mind power.

Hobo Marks

While reading Jimmy Carter’s book on his childhood a few years ago, I came across a reference to hobo marks. During the Great Depression Jimmy’s house was visited frequently by itinerant workers looking for food. His mother never turned them away and his family got a reputation for being people who would help. It was common practice among hobos to leave marks with chalk or coal on mailboxes, walls, or posts telling others of danger, safe havens, and sympathetic houses—hobo marks. Apparently, Jimmy’s mailbox was marked in such a way that it told other hobos that his family would give them food. With this underground advertising, Jimmy’s family was visited often.

I tend to think of hobos being a phenomenon that emerged from the Great Depression when so many people were out of work and were willing to travel to find it. It turns out that in the US, the hobo lifestyle developed out of the building of our railroad system after the Civil War. The railroads provided the transportation to allow people to travel, but they also provided the work they traveled to and opened up new destinations in the Wild West. In my less than exhaustive research on hobos I found that to many the term hobo represents a lifestyle, a conscious choice. There was, and still is, a hobo code and its first principle is to choose your own life. To some, the golden era of the hobo lasted from the 1880s to World War I—a time when the country was reconstructing after the Civil War, growing and modernizing. I can see how some might choose the hobo life at that time. The stock market crash a little over a decade after the end of World War I brought many men into the hobo lifestyle—probably more by necessity than choice. Still, even after World War II brought us out of the Great Depression hobos and the hobo lifestyle lived on and it continues today.

Because my social conscience developed so long after the heydays of hoboism, I’ve never really been fully aware of how important hobos and their lifestyle have been in shaping American culture. In fact, some of our most influential chroniclers of20th Century America spent time as hobos—Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, and Burl Ives. (Yep, Burl rode the rails.) My favorite line capturing what I envision as the sentiment among hobos during the Great Depression was written by Woody Guthrie in one of the “lost” verses of This Land is Your Land:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.


Hobos and their marks are still around today, and more than likely we lump them under the general, and usually pejorative, term homeless. Anyone who has thought about homeless people even a little bit realizes that it lumps a lot of people into a single category and the reasons for their current lifestyle are varied and complicated. Some are there purely because of economic circumstances, some because of substance abuse, others because of mental health problems, and at least some through a conscious choice to leave mainstream society. All of those reasons for homelessness reveal a simple fact—our society is dysfunctional.

If you haven’t quit reading this, you are probably wondering what brought this tangent out of me. Well, right after Halloween an old man in a wheelchair asked if he could rake my yard. I assume he was homeless, but I don’t know for sure. To my amazement, he raked my entire front yard piling the leaves at the curb in about an hour. It was impressive. I paid him what I would have paid the lawn guy to do the same work and also gave him some water. My kids gave him some candy. Since then, a few other guys that appear to be in similar situations have come to my door looking to rake the leaves. Two came just yesterday and one came today. Now maybe these guys are working the entire neighborhood, but I feel like we have been identified as a sympathetic household just like Jimmy Carter’s had been some 75 years ago. That realization made me think of the hobos and hobo signs.

It also has made me think about homelessness and poverty. Well honestly, the whole thing has been on my mind for a while thanks to my photographer wife. Internationally-acclaimed Dutch photographer Jan Banning was an artist in residence here at the university in the fall. While here he completed a project taking portraits of homeless people in Columbia. His plan is to display them in very oversized format on buildings in downtown Columbia—as a way of drawing attention to homelessness. I’ve seen the photos and they do what you would expect them to—they humanize homelessness and poverty. They also force the viewer to examine their stereotypes of homelessness.

The problem was shoved in my face again just the other day. I have been moonlighting as a valet for a local company, parking cars at nice restaurants. One night as I stood in front of a restaurant where people were spending hundreds of dollars on fine food and wine after driving up in very expensive cars I saw a homeless man with a shopping cart. He stopped at a trash can on the street, flopped open the lid, dug around inside, put something in his shopping cart, and moved on. The contrast between the people inside the restaurant and that man on the street was stark…and sad…largely unnoticed.

So, I’ve got homeless and poverty on my mind. There are no simple solutions, but if we ignore these problems nothing will change. Does it really take some guy from the Netherlands to care enough about a problem in our country to try to do something? If we leave things the way they are, Woody Guthrie’s question from another “lost” verse of This Land is Your Land is a good one:

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?