The layer of ice that came in the night before the snow blowing in from the North and the dark lake was as thick almost as the modern car window itself.  It covered the black Jetta he had rented.

It had taken time and effort, the car on defrost, to lift the ice off the windshield and then the side windows.  A corner might crack, then lift, and he could get it off in marzipan candy chips.  He figured out how to turn on the rear window defroster.  Meanwhile the snow was blowing.  He shyly stopped to gesture to the townhouse keeper handyman fix-it man Ben who was coming toward him with a snowblower along the walkways.  This sucks, I don't know why I stay here, for what...  four months of summer...


He got up early in the morning.  It was 14 out;  nothing more had accumulated.  He'd been awake for several hours, since his mom had called on her cell from downstairs...  He had turkey on sourdough with Poupon Mustard and Hellmann's mayonnaise, leaving half for his mom, had some tea with her as he ate on the couch with her after making her toast, and then he packed the car, said good bye, and it was too slick on the cement stoop for her to stand outside and wave good-bye, and he drove off.

The layer of ice still on the roof started to come off as he passed through the highway above Scranton.  Peeled away from the sunroof, flying off to shatter.  One piece hit the windshield of a pickup truck in the rear view mirror, but not causing any harm beyond the impact.


He had time to unpack the car, brush his teeth, fold a shirt for Saturday night at work, deciding to take the car back to the rental car garage in the hotel, and the Uber cab to work, driver by an older man, thin, hesitant at intersections, dropped him off at work at quarter to five, leaving him just enough time to set up.  But as he drove the car back, along Observatory Circle, and as he rode in the Uber down along the strip of Wisconsin Avenue, he felt the futility of all the years, his best, physically, wasted in the restaurants.   Nothing to show for it.  Still living a bit more than month to month.  Surviving.  The night, most likely, would not be much of an easy thing.  He anticipated a light amount of hostility from his co-workers.

In the end the shift wasn't bad.  A local celebrity, from a similar college as he, who had done well early in the on-line market of connected personal computers dropped in, and other friends, people he'd known over the years came in, along with all the chores.


In the distractions of visiting and caring for an aging parent for the week, his mind was different.  The idea, the concept, the purpose and the accuracy thereof, the appropriateness of his vision of the Lord Jesus, such as Jesus is, as someone not unlike himself, a capable worker at a basic trade, low in technology by modern standards, who would make the effort to be prepared, and recognized as a man with a job, this had receded.  It had receded as he went to work, his hands shaking ever so slightly, the nerves of the road, the nerves of a struggle immediately ahead, and of that struggle stretching on and only getting worse, these were thoughts that came to outweigh the other things as he returned to his life, his apartment, his job, having left his mother up north where the skies were gray, the clouds, the cold, the friendly people who always held the door for a neighbor...

Now it was make a quick stew with the meat before its too old, shower, shave, dress, what time is the bus coming had all come back to him, weighing at him.  On the bright side, before final prep, the chicken stew made the week before was still viable, and it even tasted good enough for him.  You never wanted to go to work without having eaten beforehand.  Even if there was a staff family meal.

He could feel the rattledness of old age, as he put socks on, ten minutes to go...