THE NARRATIVE ARC
Finding My Son on the Streets
We never imagined this life for our son
My husband and I just returned to Iowa from California. We spent two weeks traveling and the trip was a mixed bag of emotions. We traveled by Amtrak, which I enjoy, and he hates. But we had discussed how we both hate flying and for me, it is my preferred method of travel. He is now rethinking the flying issue.
The best part of the trip was meeting our eight-month-old twin grandbabies, a boy and a girl! They were born last July, and we delayed going to California to see them due to a rough start with the birth and letting our daughter and her husband adjust to the demands of twins. They didn’t need worried grandparents in the mix.
Our second objective was to find “proof of life” of our son, who is thirty-five and homeless. We knew that he was living on the street, but we hadn’t seen or heard from him in two years. Friends from that area had spotted him at various times but I wanted to find him and have some conversation.
He came to this situation from a decade-plus of spiraling drug addiction. Although a brilliant young man, he started in high school with marijuana and quickly moved on to narcotics, then heroin, and now fentanyl, the scariest of them all.
