Mr. Bluegrass

Tuesday evening, Mr. Bluegrass greeted me with a kiss on the cheek.

We met at a coffee shop near my house and talked for an hour without resorting to the usual 20 questions games that strangers play. He's from Kentucky and he told me about the mountains there and his father's dog, Lance, who was hit by a car on a winding road. His parents are Baptists. They eat pinto beans and cornbread, he said. He does health policy research and wonders whether he should buy the condo he's living in near Eastern Market. He started talking about religion as a form of social control and it wasn't a place either of us wanted to be, so we changed the subject.

He talked about having friends in Hawaii that were triathletes. The kind of people that swim at dusk, sharks be damned. They left jobs as lawyers and businessmen to wait tables and work at coffee shops so that they could be athletes. Iron men.

He's lived here seven years and rather likes it. He reads Howard Zinn and goes to the Birchmere in Virginia. He is pleasant and polite and calming.

All of the sudden they are closing the coffee shop and it's barely 9 p.m. We've only been here an hour. It seems abrupt to leave now, and we trudge to a bar nearby. They're closing. It's cold out and last call was 15 minutes ago. There's another bar open a few blocks up, they tell us. We stand outside, he's visibly pining for his car, parked back at the coffee shop. He's not wearing a hat, scarf or gloves and it's late January. Your call, I tell him. He says we should call it a night and I walk him back to the car, where we talk a few minutes more, hug, and say goodbye.