Eh.  I don't know...

After returning the white Nissan Altima to the hotel garage, I walk up Calvert, the Omni Shoreham across the street, past a few sleepy restaurants lazily smoldering with the last customers, up to Connecticut Avenue, not much of interest here, Mr. Chen's Organic having closed, then across the bridge high above Rock Creek Park, the parkway, and the horse stables of the Park Police, traffic obeying the turn offs, planes following each other in to the great metropolis blinking in the dark distance of night that is no longer night.  The Chinese embassy building at last nearing completion beyond the chain link fence and the closed in wooden walkway, a recently opened high level sushi restaurant hints of its interior only in the neatness, the stepping stones, the small flags of the patio, its zen front door.

Down past aging hotels, down the hill, and there, on a cold night clear, after all the rain and snow in the upper half of Pennsylvania Route 81 making it slow nervous going, a gibbous moon out, the chill of stars, there is the familiar African American woman seated on a lower stair of the St. Margaret's Episcopal Church.  She too has become a familiar part of my tiring routine of the drive back to Washington, D.C. from up North visiting with Mom.   I think it was last time I gave her the single dollar I had in my pocket, and I joked with her about how oh that will get you far in this town, and she laughed too.  I put a couple of bucks down on the step of her stoop, and she has an Indian blanket draped over her shoulders, and she's just finishing a cigarette.

It's cold, I'd like to get to the grocery store or get some take out Ka Pow, or test my resilience against the temptations of the Bistrot at the corner, where the chef is kind to me, a brother in this business, and I sit down for a little company, good to see you, how you been?

Her father was a Pentacostal minister, so she had a clean if restrictive and regimented youth, church everyday, the world full of evil to be disengaged with, heavy dark garments...

She looks, I would say, a familiar genotype to Louis Armstrong, or to my old friend Herb, mayor of Glover Park, and indeed she has roots in New Orleans and, when she can, cooks in that fashion.

The doors of the foyer of the sheltering church will open at 5:30, but there will be drugged-out hostile homeless men there first, whom she avoids, and the church doors open at 6:00 and they should let women in early so they don't have to deal.   There is a security guard lady from the building across the street, she has friends at the Hilton, and there is a young Bolivian fellow who comes out ofter and smokes a cigarette.  Her name is Brenda.



Returning, it's not easy, but there is quiet to be had.  There is another cold to fight off, the animal flustered,  in the strange routine of helping mom out with her bills, her kitchen, her apartment...  moral support, some odd hours.

Coming in from the road, a seven hour drive accomplished over more than eight hours, including pit stops, the jitters from the bumps of narrow Massachusetts Avenue in rush hour, after coming in with the flow outward from the city backed up all the way to before Frederick, the string of headlights in the darkness outlying the primitive old hills, sirens, flashing lights, firetrucks, emergency crew trucks, the blue flashing light bursts from police cars, and the many lanes of your own traffic to be vigilant over in front and behind, as everyone is racing in to find their narrower roads...  Bumpity, bumpity, over the four lane avenue, up to carefully negotiate the circle of American University, which now takes the steely nerves of a jet pilot, then downhill, apartment buildings, the side lane given to parked cars, down past the woods, then up past the church and the synagog, somewhere up to the left the Cathedral, but the focus being on following the traffic light signals to get across Wisconsin, then the last downhill stretches past the Vice President's Naval Observatory, the British Embassy, the Brazilians, the Italians, then over the bridge, the last few blocks and the left turn, click click lick...  the parking of the car close against the curb of the dirt bank, I get in, use the john, run the water a bit, open the bottle of Kermit Lynch Beaujolais there in the fridge.  After all that, a glass of the red soothes, Jesus Christ, not to take his name in vain.


I'm cold by the time I get back from my chat with my homeless person friend.  She's offered me some good spiritual advice.  Of course I'd lugged my little roller suitcase in, the other bags, shoes, toiletries, the water supplies, cold weather gear.  I open a small carton of chicken bone broth, heat it up and go off to bed leaving the wine to be.


When I wake, still in the morning, as has been the pattern up at Mom's, I self-talk remark to myself, how warped and twisted my life has been these years, the night shifts to support a strange intermittent habit of self pride and the egotistical nature of writing.  And the night shifts are probably the worst part of it, so bad that the wine becomes a crutch, and then you get up late, not having much enthusiasms for the whole thing...


Do you know what 'ego' is, Brenda asks me, after we talk a bit about favorite Scriptures, Job, Daniel, bitter herbs, they ate dandelion root back then, and after my the straight man answer, she reveals it, "Easing God Out."  Asked about my favorite scripture, having expressed my familiarity with Job and Jonah and the story of the Prodigal Son, my answer, "uh, when Peter says, 'depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man,'" her expression tells me, no, fool, that doesn't count...  To be overly anxious about things is to sin against God.

She is optimistic.  People have been kind to her before, and soon, she hopes, she will find a good place to live.


I tell her what I do for a living.  She doesn't seem to find anything wrong with it.  People love that Europe stuff, she tells me, Harry and Meghan, Elizabeth...  Get on TV blah blah blah, here's what goes with this...  She jokes about Gordon Ramsey's TV haircut, Beetlejuice hair... she says, turning away and letting out a good laughing.


This morning bits of the lady's wisdom sifts through the mind.  To listen, to hear, the advising word of God, you need quiet.  Yes, that makes sense.  "Listen to the voice inside yourself, and that's God, too," she tells me, more or less.  "Listen to your breath."   She mentions yoga, and after she elaborates, I offer, yes, there might be some Buddhism in all that, too.


If you were a perfect sceptic, I wonder if you'd hear the old resonance.

But I dislike waiting around to get ready for a night shift.  Take a shower, some yoga.  Walk to work.