Epilogue: Common Ground: Queen of E23

It being my friend HC's birthday we left at 4am. After a semi hard night of drinking, we completed an epic journey for food, then subsequently parted ways. Instead of going to crash at a friends place, I took the road less traveled and decided to stay up for the 7am metro-north.

Walking with fervorous passion and devotion, I moved from Avenue A to 2nd Avenue. My feet pounding the pavement with a gorilla-like authority, I decided to find another diner closer the GCT. To my shock I found nothing for blocks and blocks until I found her the most quaint looking diner ever (Fascist lies).

A Gnat flying into the light , I was drawn by such elegant and bold lettering, CAFE & DINER E23. The euphoric bliss of feeding my liver poison fading, I knew exactly what I needed. I needed fries and coffee with cream to ease the stomach. As usual I sat down listening to the conversations around me looking for the one interesting person in the place; to as Aristotle would say to learn from those that profess to have knowledge. Lo and behold I looked across my table and found tuft of gray hair, hazel eyes, and seemingly ghost-like sagacious skin(wrinkles) giving ghetto hand shakes to youth of the Clockwork Orange variety(without the stabbing of course). I found the person I was seeking. I then walked over having nothing better to do and asked to join her.

Gladys quietly awaited my spiel. I asked common questions like why are you sitting here full of sobriety at 4:30am in the morning? To which she responds with a heavy NY accent with a distant look in her eyes, "This is what I do. I save the youth, they come in here and try and act crazy but they respect me. Everyone here knows me. I'm like the common grandma."

After saying this I tried to gather some inkling of who she was and how she had come to be sitting in the dinner every morning from 2am-6am counseling the youth. Being rather curious I asked her about her 20s , I assumed she was perhaps once a little-child running wild . But that was not the case at all, plain lady with plain parents, married then knocked up at 21, there was no time for blogs like this. After some time and an obscene amount of simple sentences and distant looks, I gathered her philosophy on life.

The philos according to the Queen of E23 Diner : Education doesn't mean anything , if you believe it you can achieve. If you want anything out of life you've got take it.

Damn that was contrived after nearly an 1hr 30min of strange conversation, I parted ways said God Bless and she left me with a ghetto hand shake and a message: Always keep an open mind. This has obviously served her well(65-67yrs) although, not graduating from any level school she managed to not be ignorant. Her existence proves that education is not necessary to avoid being a ignorant jack-ass. I then sauntered to GCT and waited for the metro satisfied.

-Z to the izzo