抖阴ap

“I am out of luck and ideas . . .”

My mailbox and telephone just break my heart most mornings.

Far too many people are down to the last thread hanging from the end of their rope. They call me.

The worst thing is, these are people who had work that really mattered in this world. And I wish with all my heart I could help each and every one of them.

All I know is Karen Grossaint’s e-mail got to me. That first line above? It was her last sentence to me.

Some of you might remember she was once the mayor of Bennett. Those days, she says, seem like a lifetime ago.

Her dad several years back left her more than $100,000, all of which she put down on a $300,000, five-bedroom home in Bennett.

Fast-forward to 2006.

By April of that year, she had been fired from her administrator’s job at a local university and lost her home in a quick sale.

Fast-forward to October 2009, and Grossaint is speaking to me in the living room of a brand-new, unsellable Strasburg home she got the developer to rent to her for $1,300 a month, the same home she will likely be evicted from for non-payment of rent that is due the 15th.

We are talking here, folks, of a woman taking at least nine jobs since the firing. None of any of it is from a lack of trying.

Once the eviction notice arrives, Grossaint says her plan is to store everything she hasn’t already sold and live with her four dogs in her Ford Explorer, which itself is at least $300 behind in payments and barely runs.

Grossaint has this indomitable spirit, a woman who refuses to waste a minute of my time with crying.

She is a woman who spent six cold and boring months taking tolls on E-470, determined not to darken the door of a food pantry.

She has sold furniture, took a job pleading with folks to return as clients to a mass-market tax-preparation outfit. She has spent nights slinging cigarettes and taking gas money at convenience stores.

“For three years I’ve felt like I’m in this vortex, like water in a tub headed for the drain, and I can’t catch the edge,” Grossaint says, “not even close to pulling myself out.”

She is 58 years old.

“People over age 50, especially women, who are especially well- educated and highly experienced are simply not an entity in the world of work,” she says.

Countless work agencies have told her this, that employers do not want someone experienced they will have to pay.

“I always tell them I will take anything,” Grossaint says.

No, there is nothing out there, she says, for a woman with a master’s in English, a bachelor’s in English literature, outside the $500-per-month university writing job she still holds, the one that pays her much-too-much to qualify for unemployment.

Yet with certain homelessness looming, Grossaint remains upbeat. This is the part that astounds me.

“I may go down the hill a little farther, but I know somewhere I’ll catch a hand-hold and pull myself up,” she says. “I’ve volunteered for years, and know there are people suffering a lot worse.

“I do pray in the morning and in the evening — sometimes during the middle of the day,” she says. “I believe the good Lord is hearing me, that He will keep me OK.”

Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.