


Dori Sill has been in her new, Los Angeles Family Housing-subsidized apartment for over a month now. She’s gradually getting her things out of storage and putting the pieces of her life back together.

Her small apartment is filling up with the vintage furniture and artifacts that were once taken for granted, back in her salad days…



Her career and lifestyle as a professional musician now in the distant past, Dori hopes to put her arsenal of guitars and keyboards back to work… Now in her early 60s, it may be her best chance to earn a living on her own, as the aneurysm and coma which left her physically hobbled makes it a strain to even climb the stairs to her second-story apartment.

Max, Dori’s constant canine companion during the homeless years, recently passed away, but Dori still has two large cats to keep her company.

No longer homeless “but still poor,” Dori takes her lunch each Saturday at the Hope of Valley in Van Nuys, among dozens of others in various stages of homelessness and impoverishment.

One lasting sensation from today’s bike ride was the reminder that outdoors, even on a moderate, not-yet-cool late-afternoon in March, the blast of warmth that comes from the tumbling dryers when you pass or enter the open door of a laundromat is comforting, when not a reminder of what you no longer have access to. The not-so-homeless Colonel is back on the ramp, he who survives entirely on socialist subsistence programs and the kindness of strangers (as though those two things should be mutually exclusive in cases of dire need)?
The Colonel has seen them all come and go, and still knows the whereabouts of a few, or who might have last been camping on a local sidestreet. Now 80, he has worked the off-ramps of the 405 for woe these many years while shacked up in a motel room along the strip on Sepulveda Blvd. The Colonel still has the glint in his eye as he recounts surviving many health challenges, even as he must now cart around the oxygen that keeps him afloat.




This gentle soul will converse with a friendly stranger… he expresses his lamentations in abrupt tones… one of those that are said to not want to accept the offer of a shelter bed, has worn out his welcome, or prefers to scratch out a meager life in the margins.