I was called out of seclusion on a mission of mercy to my homeland, first episode to memorialize with prayer those who brought me here. To serve my surviving blood relatives.

The plane was delayed several hours, didn’t arrive until well after midnight. The car rental had 100 waiting customers served by one person. No one hollered, they waited patiently in the queue everyone feeling betrayed by the poorest of business models.

We left. Took an Uber. Deal with the car problem tomorrow.

The next day we performed the rites at the graveside for my beloveds, engineering the souls to their resting places. No longer do I carry texts of the holy words, I pull them out my chest, bleed them out my eyes.

Then the wedding of my oldest friend’s daughter. We made the prayers, lifted up a song with a guitar I had left at the house during the era of gigs.

Lunch at the delicatessen where I worked in my teenage years of Desire. I recognized the son of the then owner. It has been sixty years. Sixty years. Sixty. Years.

At the hotel out the window I parted the curtain onto a rooftop of bleating air carriers. My beloved urban skyline, mean streets I once rode on my Schwinn, not this trip. Close the drapes.

Another peek ten minutes later. I parted the curtain and looked past the bleating Air Carriers to the parking structure. On the top level, open to the sky, is a lone car. The door is open on the car and a man is dancing on the roof of the parking structure, the sound I assume from within the car I can’t hear it but his dance is full of passion and grace. Can’t forget the Motor City.

I watched for fifteen minutes. Turn away come back and there are now three people dancing on the roof of the parking structure, door to the single car open, the music I imagine.

I watched for twenty more minutes.

This the same day that the cynical Reds passed their Big Ugly Bill, on the cusp of our nation’s noble anniversary, the same day my charismatic enchanting Grandfather was born, he who brought us all into being and through whom was planted a sustaining poetry through our generations, what he had planted within me and those who will survive me.

There is a warm heart to our humanness. There is nothing that will chill this heated heart of the world and once we have opened onto it, it will survive, it will sustain. Again.

There were no cars for rent in the Motor City. I was squired around my beloved city by a Yemeni Uber driver who works day and night, the very people he whose name shall not be mentioned would like to protect us from.

These glimpses of the long look, past the air moving machines onto the rooftops in spite of cruelties through the parting of the curtain brought to you by the hot dog from the location of its purest incarnation and ascendance. Amen and amen.