The grey, overcast sky was riven with clear blue, promising a bright, blustery day as the fifty mile-per-hour winds brought the cold.

The mile and a quarter walk up from the bus stop, where a ten-year-old boy had held his six-year-old sister protectively with one hand and opened the rear door for me with the other, had left me in good spirit. As with most severely cold days in Baltimore, criminals and thugs spanning the entire urban aggression rainbow from caramel to dark chocolate huddle indoors when life is fierce, leaving the streets pristine in their loneliness. This trend is so marked, the working adults and seriously schooling children made of so much more tougher stuff than those subsidized by our cruel master government to terrorize us, that one often finds himself hoping for a natural disaster, savoring the occasional state-of-emergency snow storm…

Up and over the first high ridge, about to head up the last incline, a quarter mile from home, I look left and right before crossing the last secondary street before my destination and hear the rattling of a beaten and much-abused sedan of late 1980s vintage. I hear also, a voice, “You need a lift, bro?”

I turn and see a tall, light-skinned young fellow of coppery hue, shivering in a coat and knit hat behind the wheel of his wheezing car, and nodded, “Nah, I’m good, thanks anyway.”

“Seriously, dude, it’s colda den a muvafucka out in dis bitch—get in. I seen you all da way down on Northern Parkway—you a hikin’ somebody.”

I nodded my assent and walked around in front of his car and got in.

“Thanks, man.”

“No problem, bro. Where you live?”

“Up on White Avenue, just around the corner.”

“Well today your good day. It colda den a muvafucka out hea’ en no man should have ta walk in dis. En you got a good dude who don’ wan’ nothin’ from ya just givin’ a care en a lift. You walk fast. I saw you go past when I was warmin’ up my car. I’m goin’ up to shout at my buddy on White Avenue. I’m Cory. You party or any a dat?”

“No. I’m still suffering from delusions of athleticism.”

“Okay, dats cool, all straight en clean en shit. Whateva do it fo ya. You got a house up dere?”

“Nah, I rent a room from a friend—just head out three nights a week to work.”

“A workin’ man—dats what I’m talkin’ ‘bout. You must know Smitty.”

“Actually I don’t know any of my neighbors.”

“You jus’ move in?”

“Nah, been their six years.”

“So its like dat, huh,” he says with a shrinking distance to his voice as he sits lower in the seat.

We pass the crack head that lives across the street, whom I have seen arrested for possession thrice, whom I have never given a courteous nod to, who makes about two drive-up drug buys per day, who is gawking at Cory as if he was showing up with a Narc, as I say, “This is my spot man—thanks,” and get out as they shout at one another in their hollow way, grateful to the God of Ready Rock, for sending one of his snow-bearing angels to inform me, after six years living across the street, that the dirt bag with the pony tail and the dirty ball cap and sandpaper voice is known to his illustrious peers as “Smitty.”

Of course, Cory was not simply being kind, he was hoping to expand his costumer base by one, and, if I might commend him to his brain-eating god, he did so with such deftness that I would have, in my ghetto grocer days, considered him for a cashiering or customer service job.