A Farewell to Lars Eighner
Having gotten through a difficult week, I made a point to have a relaxing evening tonight. A good run, a nice family dinner of Fu Wah hoagies, salt and vinegar chips, and beer, and movie night with “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” on the bill. L (my 8 y.o. daughter) was so pumped by that movie that it took her a good 45 minutes to settle down and fall asleep. We have a nice routine when this happens: I’ll stay in her bedroom and sit in a chair and read while she listens to music on Spotify. This evening she started with white noise rainstorms after which she migrated to Ella Fitzgerald (currently her bedtime go to).
While she was (finally) calming down to Ella, I was doing some settling myself. Earlier this week I had brought home from my office the Lars Eighner book Travels with Lizbeth. It is a memoir of life while homeless that has stuck in my memory far more most books I’ve read, and I wanted to reread it after I saw a month or two ago that Eighner had died. In his memory, I wanted to take up this book again. Sitting in a chair waiting for L to fall asleep was the perfect time to start this.
I was not disappointed. His insights start in the introductory comments. It is not a book about homelessness insofar as he is looking at the phenomena generally or wishing to use his experience to cast it as a social problem. He doesn’t seek to paint his experiences as indicative of larger injustices. It humbly seeks to recount experiences and observations gleaned from the two or three years in which he was literally homeless, sticking largely to himself and avoiding shelters or congregating with in any homeless milieux. His refusal to renounce his companionship with his dog Lizbeth led to logistical complications in his efforts to subsist, but this was a hardship that he freely took on for the companionship that Lizbeth provided. In that respect he was ahead of his time, as more shelters are now starting to respect the bonds that homeless people have with their animals and are providing accommodations for both.
This memoir is so memorable, however, because I can just lose myself in his writing. The tone soothes me, relaxes me. I still remember various insights on dumpster diving and the loss of possessions from when I read the book decades ago, as I did his low-key voice that mixes day-by-day experiences with deeper reflections.
Early on in my read tonight I sank into his thoughts on how his recounting doesn’t do justice to how much of homeless existence is simply a mundane passing of days, one largely like another. Subsisting, he maintains, took up little of his day and he was then faced with filling in the rest of the time. Insights like these, which connect and contrast with my personal experience of life as too much running around, is another reason why I’ll stick with this book.
His is a unique perspective, and he argues that homelessness is a big lumping together of many unique perspectives that don’t fit well together under one roofless rubric. You read this one memoir of Eighner’s homelessness and you have read one homeless memoir. This singularity is what makes it so good.
I’ll pick this book up again after writing down these comments and before I go to bed. In reading Eighner’s obituary, I saw that, not to my surprise, Travels with Lizbeth made the NY Times’ list of the best memoirs of the last fifty years. I can see why.
L instinctively knows how to calm her pre-bedtime hyperactivity with white noise thunderstorms and Ella Fitzgerald. This is the only book dealing with homelessness that I have ever read (except for maybe Elliot Liebow) that has the same effect for me.