The Girl in the Red Knit Hat

For the first week, I didn't miss the girl in the red knit hat.

She was one of those anonymous figures that you saw regularly but didn't really register, not quite invisible but just a part of the landscape of the downtown bus station. It was a sad place, loud and dirty, neglected and usually smoky with exhaust fumes and diesel. It attracted the homeless and the desperate, the travelers who had no clear destination but were just looking for a way out of the city. It gave you the sense that any other place would do as long as it wasn't here. You could buy or sell drugs on the corner, stalk and rob the out-of-town gamblers who frequented the nearby casinos, or panhandle your way to a cup of coffee and a sandwich from the deli around the block. Shootings were not that uncommon and often went unreported. It wasn't a pretty or proud part of the city and no one wanted to get involved.

The girl in the red knit cap favored the corner across the street, just outside the fence of the old library building. She was tall and angular with dark, stringy hair and always carried a scarred up, old suitcase held together with rope and a ragged backpack. Often she had a guitar case slung over one scrawny shoulder and a faded Community Coffee can tied to one hip. She played for spare change and unfailingly would smile at anyone kind enough to throw a quarter or a crumpled dollar bill into the case or the coffee can. Her voice was shaky and quavery, raspy as metal on metal, but she sang nevertheless - out of tune and off key, to be sure - but never missing a lyric or a chord change. Old Baptist hymns, mostly, and some traditional twelve bar blues on her more profitable days.

It was late October when I realized I hadn't seen her in awhile, not at the bus station or on the courthouse lawn or the riverfront park. The weather had turned and as there was no sign of an Indian summer, I imagined she'd checked into one of the local shelters or boarded a Greyhound and headed farther south. New Orleans, I thought, or maybe the Florida coast, someplace where she wouldn't need a heating grate to keep warm at night.

That was a year ago and the weather has turned and turned again since then. And I still keep watch for that red knit hat.

"Everything passes, everything changes.  Even the mountains don't stand still." - Marty Rubin