I haven’t posted in some time and it really has bothered me. It’s like wanting to cook because I feel good when I do, but I’m too busy so I don’t and then I’m dissatisfied with my diet.  Similarly, communicating makes me feel good, and purposeful.  And I have been writing, just not stuff I want to put out here.  It seems my desire for the “simply stated”, which I am more comfortable sharing, has been held under water by the “holy shit” jumble of hurrying-up and the chaos I create for myself in the last part of every year.  I hate to blame the holidays but they really don’t help.  And as hard as I try not to over schedule or set my expectations too high, I do both.  There is something in me that gets swept away and I lose sight of any semblance of peace or serenity I may have gathered through the summer, unfortunately. Oh well, I am  back.  And I want to re-enter this blog with an interesting thing that I discovered in the past few weeks: hobo signs.  I have some computer generated examples attached here, and I hope you enjoy them.

I like these signs and I knew nothing about them before I received one as a gift.  Briefly (I swear), I received this gift in the mail a couple weeks ago.  It was from my friend’s mom who I consider my friend also.  I am not sure why it’s important that she is my friend’s mom and is now my friend too, but it is and I like her very much.  She notices things that I notice, and we have a lot in common.  Weird things like she lives across the country but when I visited her I noticed we have planted the same flowers in our yards, just by coincidence … but back to the gift.  I actually think she meant to send it a year ago because she mentioned that she had the perfect gift for me then, but it just came in the mail now.  I understand that completely, it’s another similarity I can appreciate.  Anyway, I love the gift because it has me thinking about simple forms of communication and our basic instinct to look after each other.  The gift was a wooden plaque that has a primitive picture of a cat and it says “a kind-hearted woman lives here”.   I am not certain it describes me, but when I opened it I thought, well that’s nice…odd, but very sweet.  When I mentioned that I had received it she told me that the cat was one of many symbols that hobo’s used in the 19th century to help each other.  I had no idea they did that, so I did some research and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

Apparently there have been hobos (tramps, vagabonds, homeless folks) drawing signs to each other for a long time, all over the world. In the United States they started drawing these signs in the period after the Civil War.  There were a lot of hobos then who were mostly veterans (not surprisingly) traveling around looking for work.  They were simple drawings on fence posts or elsewhere indicating “a chance for food”,  “a place to sleep” , “an angry man” or “mean dog ahead” among other things.  There is even one that indicates “a lusty woman lives here”.  Wow! That’s pretty cool right?  They usually drew the signs with pieces of coal so I couldn’t find pictures of originals because they probably disintegrated.  There are some scholars though and a hobo museum with information online about this probably now dead-language.

I don’t want to say much more about these signs because words aren’t really necessary, they were meant to speak for themselves.  I am fascinated though that human beings, while jumping train cars to the next town looking for food and work, were compelled to throw up a helpful message to others in the same circumstance.  There was some kind of underground brotherhood that existed among otherwise perfect strangers.  I like to imagine that this could still be true.  That as we are trying to survive this modern hustle, hurry and barely-hangin-on lifestyle, that we could still care enough about each other to send a warning or a quick “heads up”.  And it’s the simple messages that would strike me most.

I kinda wish my fellow over-doing-everything brothers and sisters would adopt a system similar to the hobo signs.  We could strategically draw pictures with lipstick on the entrance to highways or restaurants or certain businesses.  A symbolic language that says “there’s always traffic here” or “most of this food is bad for you” or “beware, these guys are liars”.  And of course one saying “a kind-hearted woman lives here” would remain a welcomed relief for our often weary souls :-).