Walking past Illinois Masonic hospital today, I crossed paths with a woman wearing a contraption on her right leg that looked as if the leg was a lipstick stuck in a shiny case.

Slight of build was she with a babushka on her head, the kind of babushka my aunties wore when they walked in rain from the car into church.

She clumped right into the multilevel parking garage, a huge concrete structure pretending it isn’t ugly by cascading green foliage from every tier, like the gardens of Babylon, but not.

Now I know it isn’t possible to drive a car wearing a cast like hers. Where was she going? She clumped like a woman who never asked for help or had no experience receiving some. I didn’t offer any but now I wish I had.