Oct 2, 2012, Another Walk

It is 5 pm and Dayve and I headed out toward Cheeseman Park for a walk. Three blocks down Vine St, right in front of Lik's Ice Cream, Dayve darted across the street and I was too slow and had to wait. A very elderly lady coming down the street caught my eye, and apparently I also caught her's and she asked for help across the street and then she asked for help down the block and then all the way to her apartment.

But she was a chatty interesting woman so we were happy to be patient. I am sure the guilt of both of our elderly parents being miles away made us even more willing to help. It turns out she had her PhD in Art History, and as I later discovered after I googled her, she taught art history at Pratt, New York University and also University of Colorado Denver. There were also numerous comments about the classes she held at the Botanical Gardens and various artist guilds in Denver.

So we got her to her door and she insisted that we come up to her apartment. We were both quite hesitant to go up to an almost strange elderly woman's apartment, but she was very insistant. So up we went!  The place was full of her art work as well as a grand piano that she loved to play until her fingers became gnarled and stiff from arthritis.
We took her address and phone number and gave her ours, but I wonder if I call her tomorrow if she would remember that we met today.

Never a dull walk

I usually walk a couple of miles a day. Today I had one last assignment to critique and then I was going to go for my walk. I opened the assignment and decided I needed to walk first...

So off I headed to City Park, one of my usual routes. Alas it was near 5pm and the traffic was so thick I could not get across 17th street, so I went west instead.

Toward the end of the 2 mile route, I came to a small 40ish woman sitting hunched over on a step outside of an old apartment building. She had a couple of shopping bags beside her and looked up at me and asked if I had a phone. My guard immediately went up, and I asked Why, and she asked if I would call 911 because she had just been beaten. Of course I called, and the dispatcher started asking me questions that I had to ask this woman for answers. Her partner was on meth. She is tired of him beating her. She has had heart failure. And then I began to realize she was also drunk....

Do I tell the dispatcher not to bother because she is drunk or do I carry on? Then a "friend" of hers drove by and stopped and tried to get her to go with him. She told him to leave. He drove a block away and watched. The fire truck arrived, and the fire men calmly walked over to her as they sized up the situation. The expression on their faces told me they had heard the story many times.

I asked one of them if I was needed for anything and he shook his head and I continued home. Half a block later the "friend" stopped me and thanked me for trying to help. He said he would have taken her home, but his wife wouldn't allow it.

Downtown living is too real some days.