The Walk to Work: Summertime...

Summer in Baltimore is an experience. Temperatures rise into the 90s and higher, which is only painful when you take into consideration the 95% humidity. From the volume of people hanging out on the sidewalks and playing softball or tennis in the park, you'd think it was pleasant outside. It is not. Of course, un-air-conditioned rowhomes are even more miserable.

Needless to say (given the title of this post), I continue to walk to and from work. I have to bring a shirt to change into in the morning, and at the end of the day I notice a strange reluctance to leave the office and make the trek home. It's like walking in soup. Immediately upon entering the house, avoiding eye contact with Richard if he's home, I go straight upstairs and strip down and hose off in the shower. Once in the safety of my porcelain haven, I feel like a human being again.

Truth be told, the element of my walk that most affects me these days is not the heat but rather a particular person I pass nearly every morning. He sits on a stoop across the street from a shelter and a block down from the Helping-Up Mission, surrounded by what I presume are all his belongings (a backpack, a couple of plastic bags filled with I don't know what). He is a black man, maybe 45, maybe older (or younger?). He always makes eye contact with me, always returns my "good morning" with a greeting or at the very least a head-nod, even if I interrupt him as he's searching through one of his bags or talking to himself, which he does from time to time. Usually he is just sitting. He has a remarkably kind face, a gentle spirit about him. He never leers, never begs, never looks at me with bitterness or contempt or anything but the simplest acknowledgement that I am a person and he is a person and we exist in each other's universes. I look forward to seeing him, for his smile exudes peace. When his smile is absent and replaced by just a slight nod of the head or wave of the hand, what becomes visible is the pain in his eyes, loss, a knowing of what the day will bring or fail to bring or what days past have brought. Whatever is on his face, every time I see him, I feel as though I witness grace personified, grace wrapped up in old clothes and scruffy face, grace that hasn't bathed in days, grace that is not self-conscious or ashamed or proud. Does he know of this grace that fills him, surrounds him, transcends him? Is it merely a product of my romantic imagination?

My heart longs to reach out to him, to know him, to ask his name, to hear his story. I am tempted to invite Richard on my walk so we can meet him together...The risk of course is dispelling my interpretation of who this man is. Do I really want to know, or is it enough to believe? I feel a sense of obligation to find out.

Saturday Review

I've gotten pretty lazy with blogging. Seems like all I have (make?) time for are short and not very thoughtful entries, and I feel like what's the point? But perhaps the point is just to make regular contact with the four people who read this thing, to let them know I'm still alive and still exerting a significant level of brain and emotional energy on insignificant things.

Today, Saturday, was actually a fairly good day. After a few weekends of winding up depressed because my unreasonably high expectations for "getting a lot done" were dashed as I sat around and did virtually nothing due to my inability to do everything, this morning R and I knew we needed a better plan. So we started the day by going to one of our favorite cafes, sitting outside drinking coffee and reading the paper. The cafe is in a yuppy-ish part of the city, just a block away from the harbor, which means it provides ample opportunities for dog-watching and making fun of perky well-made-up women. Sure, I feel a little guilty about this tendency of mine to automatically dislike women who wear make-up early on a Saturday and who smile excessively, but I don't feel guilty enough to repent yet.

R and I went to the grocery store on our way home and then decided to go for a jog. Today was an absolutely beautiful day -- not too hot, plenty of sun but not a perfectly clear sky, a nice breeze. Thank God we were able to be outdoors this morning. I spent much of the afternoon/early evening working on a proposal to be presented to a church partner on Monday in Michigan. It's a big proposal and I was relying heavily on a friend and co-worker who is part of the economic development team. He is currently in Rwanda so our communication was limited to email and skype chats, which would be less irritating if my computer's keyboard were not missing the "i" and "j" keys. I lost the "j" key in an unfortunate incident with a fork, and the more essential "i" was sacrificed when I tried to save the "j".

We ate a frozen pizza for dinner (we heated it up first) and watched a couple episodes of The Office, which I've grown to love. At the grocery store, R and I bought ant traps (like houses of poison) so we put those out and after dinner I observed a long and impatient line of ants bump into but ultimately avoid the traps. I didn't think ants were intelligent creatures, but they do seem to have outsmarted us for now. So kitty will have to tolerate a diet of mixed dry cat food plus small presumably harmless insects until we devise Plan B.

So that is the story of my day. Not a terribly exciting Saturday, I know. And tomorrow R will drive to Canada to renew his visa and I will fly to Michigan for a couple of days of meetings. Life in the fast lane, that's what we live.

Brake Failure

Today at church the sermon was about the importance of having a day of rest. We were, the pastor said, designed to work hard and creatively for six days and then to rest on the seventh day (not in a legalistic way, but you know what I mean). The sermon was titled, "STOP: Brake Failure." Sermons at my church are always organized into series with clever themes and catchy names. I might have enjoyed the message more had they started on time and not kept us 15 minutes later than normal -- sure it's Sunday, but I've got work to do.

The irony is that this is the same church pushing us to "read the Bible in 90 days" this summer. Start your engines...

R is making his way through the Old Testament. He announced this morning that he found the first instance of sarcasm in the Bible -- it's in Exodus. The people are complaining to Moses and they say something like, "Were there no graves in Egypt? You had to take us to the wilderness to die?!" We decided we should write a book called "The Dry Humor Guide to the Bible."

This evening, R peered over his laptop to ask me a question as I was working on my laptop: "We really should hold each other accountable to keeping Sunday as a day of rest. Don't you think?" Yes, I do. Maybe next Sunday.

Too much

I have so much to do at work and there's no light at the end of the tunnel. There's just more tunnel. It's like the best I can hope for is to not get hit by a truck. Or maybe the best I can hope for is to get hit by a truck, just to put me out of my misery. I joke.

My brain feels like mush, like mush in the center of a great big ball of static, of pointless noise that prohibits clarity and makes rest impossible. Last night, I was working until 10:30 and I woke up this morning with plans to work for most of the day. Instead, I wound up working for maybe two hours and spent at least twice as much time thinking about working, dreading work, reading the BBC news web site, flipping through The Economist, and melting in the sun to escape my computer.

Late this afternoon we went to a bowling party for a friend who's preparing to return to Iran for the summer...He is my dear friend's boyfriend. She is struggling with the reality that in one week, she'll live (as she did last year) in fear that something terrible will happen to him, that something terrible will happen between the US and Iran, that he'll never come back, that he'll stop loving her. All unlikely (with the exception of perhaps the second item), but all out of her control. This world is so strange.