One night after heavy rain, after work, just following my return to the city from my mom's, I went out back in the garden and pulled out vines and weeds.  They came out easily and soon there was a good pile of them on the step stones.   In the morning, in the light, there a clump ten feet by ten, about four feet high of pulled vines, small trees, a miscellany of weeds that in the jungle weather and rains had overtaken the garden.  After a few hot dry days there now needed to be a way to get rid of the pile.

Too much to take out to be put in big hefty bags, I choose a late night after work, took out the weber grill from dusty corners, low on charcoal, found an eternolog made of recycled cardboard impregnated with combustible wax, built a starter fire and started piling on the vines, still green, some of them wet.  The dead of summer.  Smoke rose quickly, and then flames, and when the flames went down, I threw on more and the smoke was everywhere, the smell of campfire on the clothes.  I was careful, and nervous, and watching with a hose incase the flames rose too high or any neighbor might wake and call out, what the hell are you doing.  The hour got late, and the pile went up in smoke without incident.

Except for a small scratch on the back of the leg, as I'd been dumb enough to conduct this damp and dirty business wearing shorts rather than jeans.

And weeks later, after attempting to treat something looking ulcerous and the back of my left calve, red, itching.  In an attempt to topically treat, I'd forgotten my allergic reaction to the antibiotic Neosporin.  Bandages, sterile cotton, hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, tea tree oil, silver ointment, and Polysporin tube sat around the coffee table as I went to and fro from work.

So I sat waiting in the doc's office on a rainy morning, a copy of The Bhaghavad Gita in the recesses of my wet courier bag as I sat on the examination table, the paper crinkling beneath.

I am told just to cover it and leave it alone.  That's it.  Soap and water.  A bandage.

Funny;  best just to leave things alone, to let wounds heal themselves, no matter how bad, or infected, things might look.

It's a weak spot for me.  I came closer than I'd like to think about an infected wound when I first came to town.  There was a waitress who waited for the poor busboy sweeping up after the night, that first year at Austin Grill.  There was some sort of after work get-together, a break for the norm.  I rode with the cooks, who got there, and decided they needed they needed to make a cigarette run.  And I, being as quiet as I was back then, having a hard time expressing my will, simply opened the door of the moving car and stepped out into the alley of a DC summer night.  Later on I made it back to her mom's apartment with her, and she took care of the wound on my foot, which got worse.  It wasn't til one of my housemates where I lived down on Foxhall, Sandra Patty, a nice woman who'd travelled in Europe and wore European laundry which was often drying upstairs near the bathroom hallway, told me I needed to go to a doctor, gave me a name for one, shaking her head as she looked at the wound just inside and down the foot from my right ankle bone.

That was the time when I'd first came to town and worked two jobs.  The temp job by day, the busboy by night.  The doctor gave me an antibiotic, and showed me I needed to keep the wound clean, etc,. cleaning it out twice a day and keeping it elevated.  Both jobs were ones I had to do on my feet.  I remember sitting in a men's room stall where I cleaned the wound at lunch time in the office somewhere near 19th or 20th and L or K.  The scab gave way under as I swabbed it with the hydrogen peroxide, and black sort of hole opened up, and I almost fainted at the look of it.  I cleaned it out, didn't look too deeply at it, put the antibiotic ointment on it (I wasn't allergic to at that age), bandaged it up, took a deep breath and went back to work.  It hurt.  I took aspirin, and I got through my shifts, and eventually, I forget how long, it began to heal up, no more hole in my leg with black stuff in it.  No more gauze bandage to put over it and limp through a night standing on my feet running around as a busboy.

Healing is a wonderful thing.  And we all have our scars.  We all are, well, almost dead, either in the narrow good way a thing went rather than a bad way.  My brother's fingers remember on cold days holding together the electrical system that kept the motor of a fishing boat running, somehow under the cold sea water that had risen within the boat.  Numb and pain.  He doesn't tell the story often.

Some wounds, though, you have to, as I say, leave alone.



Actually, I found that my hospitality, it came at a good time in the world.  And that life and the world should throw my talents toward the job as it was and had to be dealt with was not a bad thing, once I got healthy, as August with a  belly full of sunlight allows, before the darkness of clock changes and winter night shifts and cold bare commutes on a bicycle.

You had to look at what is going now, as far as automation, globalization, the possibility of robots taking over, no more brick and mortar, etc., etc., etc.   There has to be some common reflection of the hospitality which is at our own spiritual reality as a high animal most capable of hospitality.

Outside on Connecticut Avenue, near the old office of my therapist, and near the alley that takes you from N Street and behind the old low brick stables that have stood since before Lincoln's time, behind the tall office buildings, the side door to enter the red brick cathedral of St. Matthews, there is a halal stand that serves lamb and chicken and felafel, for $6 or $7 a decent meal to have under your belly after the talk at the therapist office regarding your own mental health and life and history and existential situation, there is hospitality.  The young man is from Syria, I think.  I talk with him through Ramadan fasts when it is hot out...


It is a high claim, I suppose, to think you're doing something noble and spiritual serving wine and food.  There could well be Quixotic bluster to it, no doubt.  We are flawed representatives, earthy, sinful, fallen, living in a broken rattling world full of people grasping for power without the balance, perhaps, to keep a balance.

And it is enough to return, after one's labors, to one's own little peaceful chapel and place of prayer, a Buddha statue, some wine, incense, monkish duties, folding too many clothes, fixing supper, taking out the wine bottles, the plastic used, the trash.

I began to not really care about getting published and all that.  I'd found hospitality, and kept at it.  I'd written things as truly as I could see them.