First time I met Louise, she was sitting smack in the middle of traffic. Not on a quiet, residential street, either - no, she was on Garfield Avenue, stubbornly deployed in a green-and-white beach chair, at least six feet from the curb. Cars were coming to a stop, waiting for the chance to dart into the other lane to get around her, horns blaring. When I rolled up and hit my lights, she barely looked up. She was reading the Style section.

“You’d think the city had better things for its police to do than this. Like maybe protecting people’s rights!” she snapped. “Yes, ma’am. But right now, I’m protecting you.” “Hmmmph!” she replied, and then she produced a property deed to the rundown motel behind her. “You look at this,” she said, “and see if you think I’m not right on my own property.” I went to her office porch, came back with a matching chair, and sat down next to her. I looked over the deed, and told her it sure did look like she had a case - cars swarming around us all the while, folks craning their necks. As I say, that’s the first time I met Louise - on a hot day in June. I’d remember the encounter even if I hadn’t had to fill out paperwork on it. But now, many years later, more than anything I remember her framed by a waiting room window on Christmas Eve. It’s funny what pictures stay with you, and why.

You see, Louise told me (and everybody else) that the city was conspiring to foreclose on her business - a dingy 1950s motor court that was her life’s work (and her home) of the last 40-odd years. That was why she’d staked her claim in the street - to show the Board of Supervisors that she wasn’t going anywhere. Of course, she was going and she knew it: Louise had cancer that had gone to her kidneys. She was sure the city knew it, too, and that made her madder than anything. “Serve ‘em right if they have to come out here and pick me up themselves. And I’ll make sure the door is locked, too, so they have to break it down to cart me away!”

Over the next few months, I saw Louise several times. Her guests were mostly on the weekly rate, pretty good fellas, construction workers in the main - but like all young fellas they could get rowdy when drinkin’ on weekends. Louise, however, had very little tolerance for what she called “nonsense and carrying on.”

Then on Christmas Eve, my personal cell phone went off. It’s not procedure, but I’d given her my number because a lot of her calls got solved just by talking her down. It had got so Dispatch would beep in and tell me “my mother was calling again,” so I finally told her to call my cell unless it was “a guns-drawn emergency.” That Christmas Eve I was working, and the snow was coming down like the sky was falling in. Because it was cold, there was no melt; about four inches were already blanketing the streets.

“Tom, you workin’ tonight? I got a problem.”

“Go ahead, Louise.”

“I got one of these Mexicans up to some nonsense here, and I need you to come quick!” Her voice sounded tight, so I wound my way over there; she was waiting for me on the porch of the office bungalow.

“I got a Mexican who’s fixing to be a mom. In my place! No husband, nothing! Need you to get her out of here.” I radioed dispatch and left the motor idling. She led me along a snow-dusted sidewalk under the eaves, to a faded green door with stick-on numbers.

Louise gave a quick knock and went to use her passkey. I asked her to hold on for me to identify myself. Inside, in a room lit by a pale bulb over the sink and the blue glow of a TV, was a girl of maybe 17, balled up under a green velour comforter decorated with cigarette burns. The girl was plainly terrified, probably as much by my uniform as her predicament. I tried to reassure her. Louise stationed herself by the door, her arms folded in disapproval.

“Guess he’s going to be a citizen now. Well, just being born here don’t make him one of us!” The girl was now whimpering, sobbing. “What’s she saying?”

“I can’t make it all out. Says her husband had to work today and couldn’t get back ‘cause of the snow.” I radioed in, and took the girl’s hand while I did. It was sweaty and clammy. She was hurting, pretty far along, I guessed. When she rolled onto her back, the bedcovers revealed a big blossom of blood, almost black in the dim light. “Well, I don’t like the look of that.”

Louise leaned in, saw, and her face went slack. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Not sure. That’s right much blood, though.” I called Dispatch again, and he advised an ambulance would be a good twenty minutes out, maybe more. “Your call, Tom,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

“Yep.” I heard the door shut; Louise was gone. A moment later she crunched up in my patrol car. She had the back door open before I’d even made up my mind what I was gonna do.

As we made our way through the near-whiteout, the girl moaned nonstop. “What’s she saying now?”

“She’s praying to the Virgin Mary.”

Louise stared back at the pitiful shape under the blankets. “Well,” she said, “I guess I can unnerstand that.” She turned back around. “Hope you won’t arrest me for driving your squad car back there.”

In fact, it was the first joke I’d ever heard her attempt. “Nope. But that shotgun better be in the rack where I left it.”

“Hmmph!” she said. At the hospital they were waiting on us, and got the girl onto a gurney and into the ED. “If you have to get back,” Louise said, “ you can just come pick me up later.”

“Louise, you don’t want me to carry you now? It’s piling up pretty fast. You might be here longer than you think.”

“Seems like somebody should wait on her. Nobody waitin’ for me at home, anyhow.”

We stood there beside the molded plastic chairs in the waiting room, watching the snow fall. After a few moments, she said, “Now I know how that innkeeper felt.”

“How’s that?”

“He probably didn’t want ‘em in his inn, crying and carryin’ on. Giving birth and all. Upsetting the paying customers.”

“Never thought of that.”

“Yep.” I’d never heard Louise volunteer anything remotely biblical, and couldn’t help but wonder what was next. I didn’t have to wait long. “One more Mexican in the world.”

“Girl said she’s from El Salvador. Said her name’s Maria.”

“Hmph. Didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”

“It helps,” I replied. Louise looked pale and very thin, her forehead like a blue-veined road map. “You OK, Louise?” She didn’t answer, just stared out at the weather.

“You go on, Tom. I’ll stay.”

“I’m not in a big hurry.”

Evidently, that was what she was waiting for. She turned to face me, her eyes dark and sunken. “I was here like this girl, about a million years ago. Same ugly hospital. Thought if I had a baby my husband would act more like he was married. Probably wouldn’t have worked that way, anyhow.”

I waited.

“They told me the baby came out dead. Don’t know why. Back then, it wasn’t like today. I never even saw him. Never saw my boy. On August the 27th, I always think, ‘my boy would be 6 this year, my boy would be 18.’ Now he’d be…land, 47! I think about that on Christmas Eve, all the folks going to see family.”

“I’m sorry, Louise,” I said. It wasn’t much, I know, but it was all I could think of.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand about Christmas. If Jesus had been my boy, it would have been a different story. I would never have let him go. All the way to earth? No way. I don’t see what kind of a father could do that. And knowing what his baby was in for? That’s like…like a Prodigal Father.”

“A Prodigal Father?”

“Yeah. It’s backwards. Instead of running out of the house to meet his son, he just stands there and lets him go. Don’t make no sense. Sure isn’t what I would do.” The PA system squawked overhead.

“Louise, maybe you’re just waiting for Christmas to come.”

“How’s that?”

“You don’t think this world is a fit place for God’s Son to be born. And you’re probably right about that. But it’s the place where we live. And I guess you could say being born here makes him one of us.”

She caught my joke and almost smiled. “Hmph,” she said.

Some time later, I got a call - burglar alarm went off at a dry cleaners. I tried to get her to catch a ride, but she wouldn’t have it. “Nope. I’m fine here. This is as good a place to ring in Christmas as any.”

And that’s the way I remember her, standing at the window, looking determined, turning away to pick a chair to wait in. Of course I saw her a couple more times, when she was real sick, but that’s not how she’d want to be remembered. That night at the hospital she was unbowed, and thinking about the questions we carry and the answers we wait on.

I’ve thought about it since, especially this time of year. There are so many folks who are waiting for Christmas to come. It took one of them to open my eyes to how much God gave away on Christmas Eve: in the midst of our own losses, God sent his only Son to us, being the kind of Father who was willing to wait. Maybe that is a strange kind of fatherly love. I don’t know. I am glad Jesus had so good a mother to wait on him. But I think that night, when heaven looked down on Bethlehem, his Father was the only One who knew that Jesus was going to leave the world exactly as he entered it: his body fragile, his arms bound, and his spirit completely submitted to love.

And I think love like that is worth waiting for.

Copyright: David J. Rochford III, 2009

Use with permission of the author: pastor@stmarksmethodist.com.