not so lost boy

I began a new job last week, at the San Diego chapter of United Cerebral Palsy – UCP. There’s something awake and alive within the adjoining realms of karma/irony/right where you’re supposed to be in this newest life journey. My son Spenser has received services and case management from the Oregon UCP in Portland for some seven years now. My ex was the wonderful Family Services director there for 15 years. I received state monies as a support worker for Spenser just before, all during, and poking out of the end of the worst of covid, and was overseen by UCP.

So there’s something – drum roll, serious clinical word coming – cool about finding myself as an employee with UCP in San Diego. Very cool. Way cool. It’s part time, my choice, between 12 and up to 18 or 20 hours a week. Like they said in “Animal House”, “We need the dues,” and I need the money, especially embarking on yet another adventure right here and now – getting to live with Ann – at this same time in my life. At 74+ this is way past an old dog with new tricks. It’s being a “Lost boy”, forever young, pinkish eyes wide with wonder, my heart forever vibrating with abundance. The days filled with love. The fact I land at UCP just the next paragraph in the story.

There’ll be two clients eventually, just one so far, she works at the Logan Heights library here in SD, and I spent three mornings/early afternoons there with her last week. My title is either ‘Employment Specialist’ or ‘job coach’ – either will do – and I got to hang out in a library nine hours last week – a very cool library branch with all kinds of celebration to the vast culture which makes up the stuff we’re supposed to be shooting off fireworks for. And I was paid.

I could have picked up pink eye running my hands over a thousand books in the children’s section. Lost boys get sick too. Folks I hang with sometimes say, “The joy is in the journey.” To which my old pal Billy MacDonald – another lost boy – would have said, “Yowser!”