God Bless the Child

Like we say here, she was a real Baltimore lady. She started singing at funerals when she was six. As a hot young jazz singer, she hung with best friend Billie Holiday and jammed with Miles and Coltrane on Pennsylvania Avenue in the 40's and 50's, at classy venues like the Royal and the Regent, as well as notable joints like the Club Casino, the Sphinx, the Avenue Bar, or the Alhambra. "It was just swinging all the time, all the time," she once recalled.

This past Friday night, 77 years young, she was gigging once again on behalf of woman's shelter. Three songs into her set onstage at the Creative Alliance, she suddenly stopped, then slumped over into the arms of two fans. She passed the next day at Hopkins, where she'd worked for 30 years.

Ruby Glover died the way she lived--in the middle of a song.

Distances

So tonight I'm thinking about distances--between the pitcher's mound and home plate, between safe and out, between lost and found. This week north of San Francisco, an set of 42 radio dishes, the first stage of a larger array funded by Microsoft founder Paul Allen, began sweeping the sky for signals that confirm we are not alone in this great galactic wheel of 200 billion stars. With so many, it's impossible we cannot connect, crowed one astonomer, predicting a first contact by 2025. (Others are not so certain, imagining the universe as a vast empty amusement park, with Earth the only working ride.)

Planets. Car keys. Desaparecidos. I think things are not so easily found. Even Dantini the Magnificent could make a lit cigarette vanish into thin air at the old Peabody Book Shop & Beer Stube--and not come back. Last month, a local college student disappeared while driving to his girlfriend's apartment. Poof. A missing person bulletin was issued. Searchers scoured the area. Nothing-- no crumpled note, no candlestick in the library. A week passed. Then a motorist saw him crawling along the side of a nearby road. His car had skidded and tumbled into a densely wooded ravine, where he remained pinned upside down until cutting himself loose with a penknife. He drank muddy water from a stream with his shoe. He caught and ate a fish raw. He was six miles from his house, surrounded by suburbs, stop lights, and strip malls.

Sometimes, there's no place so far away as close to home.

The Way It Always Is, Here in Baltimore

It's a good story. One early June evening, the humid air a velvet against the skin, a pal and I slipped in the side door and down a narrow set of stairs to the underground bar where plastic roses twined through plastic trellises, the jukebox played the German national anthem, and my best friends were all gigging in the house band. The smoke was thick, the music loud and fractious, the beer cheap and cold. It was wonderful.

Stay away from her, the guitarist said. She's a real bitch. But I had only just seen her behind the bar serving drinks and couldn't stop. I had made up my mind to leave Baltimore. I had burned through a lot of it and the Northwest was looking fat. But a few more weeks in the old town couldn't hurt, revisit a few old haunts, my favorite smelly taverns, and then head west.

I headed up to the bar. She was beautiful not just because she was young, but because she would always be that way, flashing hazel eyes and pale skin framed by long curls of chestnut hair even then streaked with grey. Can I have a free drink, I asked her, I'm with the band. No, she said, not even looking up from rinsing glasses. She moved on down the bar and I saw her purse tucked down on the floor with a beat-up copy of Pride & Prejudice sticking out the top. I watched her as she pulled beers, poured drinks, and kept the jerks like me at bay. One guy, beaded and wearing a porkpie hat and impossibly dark glasses, leaned over the bar and hollered, Hey sugah, what's your sign. Without missing a beat, she shot him a haymaker glance and said, Stop. And for a moment, everything did. Then laughter roared down the bar and the night went on. I stood there, knowing there had to be a way.

There was, but just barely. She told me later that if I had asked her to have a drink with me instead of coffee, she would have turned me down flat. I asked her to have coffee. A month later, I proposed to her in an Indian restaurant. And 24 years ago today, Dear Reader, as guests jumped up in the middle of the service to announce the progress of the O's aginst the Phillies in the fourth game of the '83 Series, I married her.

Death Takes A Holiday

Bergman's The Seventh Seal is a film that long ago checked itself into the permanent collection of my cabinet of wonders. So I imagine Bengt Ekerot as Death striding our streets with his faint smile, and then inexplicably pausing September 28 to October 5. What roar dropped out of the air, like a battle that breaks at darkness. What random fragile grace. Seven days without a murder in Baltimore. Our new police commish opined that it was not "luck or a voodoo magic act" that caused peace to break out briefly in our city. But with one person on average dying every day in Baltimore from a bullet, even Death must want a take a breather.

Please.

In Medias Res

How should it start, he asked? Like all good stories, she smiled, in the middle of things. And you the hero, except screwed up, beat down to all get-out like Dante, off-roading down to the circlular front drive of Hades itself.

I sense a shift in diction, he said.

But then you come back, she said, ignoring him. You come back from Hell still somehow alive, with a new knowledge. You take up life where you left it. You don't explain what happened before. You don't try to be special. You continue to do your job, be a good family man and mind your manners. But inside.

She paused. He waited as light shifted across the floor.

Inside, she said quietly, the new knowledge waits to be heard.

He drew a long breath and looked away. When he looked back, she was staring at him, hard, as hard as the city around them could be, as hard as these words.