Vendor Spotlight: June P.

BY HANNAH HERNER

In the last month, June P. has been experiencing the excitement of having her own place to live while also experiencing the grief of losing her mother. After she’s done selling papers near Osbourne’s Bi-Rite on Belmont Boulevard, she lies down to watch Law and Order in a bed that used to belong to her mom. Her feelings are incredibly mixed.

“I love it. I love it. It’s up on the tenth floor, the high floor. You can see everything,” June says. “I’ve been lazy. My mom passed away a couple months ago, so I got her bed. I just lay in the bed and watch TV. I clean. I’ve lost like 25 pounds since she died. So I’ve just been trying to eat a lot.”

After a year of living in her car, June P. got her own apartment through a Section 8 voucher. The process was delayed a couple of months by

COVID-19. A connection she gained through fellow Contributor vendor Gary E., also known as Pops, paid off.

“I had been going up there every once and a while to his apartment, hanging out because I didn’t know anybody really,” June says. “The manager there would see me going in and she’d joke like ‘you need to go in there and get him up, make him go to work.’ I had filled out my Section 8 papers and everything and she said, ‘no you have to fill them out for the property.’ She said ‘I’ll let you know when I’m taking applications.’”

That manager called June the night before the applications opened and arranged to have her fill out the application in her office the next day.

“If it hadn’t been for her, I don’t know,” June says.

June P. grew up in Nashville with her seven

brothers and sisters. They lived on Nolensville Road and Old Hickory Boulevard on a hill that was replaced by a church.

“We’d been real close until mom passed,” June says. “There was a lot of arguments. You know how it is, that many kids. We still haven’t had a service for her. There was a lot of fighting and arguing and it kind of grew us apart.”

Growing up, June was very shy, and mostly kept to herself. She was very close to both of her parents and spent lots of time with her father before he passed away 30 years ago at the age of 52. That closeness is evidenced by a tattoo on her left arm. She also kept The Contributor readers updated on her mother’s condition and wrote tributes to her, in addition to her usual short musings and artwork.

“I used to keep a journal and I stopped that,

I don’t know why. My writing and drawing kind of gets stuff out of me that I don’t talk about to other people,” June says. “I can get it all on paper. I do a lot of that at night when I can’t sleep.”

June says working for The Contributor has helped her to come out of her shell.

“When I started working The Contributor, I didn’t know how to talk to people,” she says. “I didn’t know how to communicate. It’s helped me open up and talk to people, which was real hard. It’s helped me a lot to stand up for myself, stop letting people run over me, use me. I have a lot of customer friends at the store that I’ve gotten real close with. A lot of people that God’s put in my life that’s helping me. And I’ve met them through selling papers.”

Now her customer friends can be there for her when her typical support system isn’t.