At the King's threshold

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WASHINGTON -- On Mondays and Tuesdays, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown Washington doesn't open its doors until noon. If the temperature is below freezing, as it was last week for the first time this winter, about 50 people who live on the streets or in shelters and who gain their meals from begging or from church kitchens are lined up outside the entrance before 11:15, so eager are they to safely be indoors for the afternoon.

On Tuesday, the first person in the queue was a woman sitting in a blue canvas camping chair who was holding a neatly-lettered sign that said SPARE CHANGE 4 MEDICATION THANK YOU HAPPY NEW YEAR. Behind her was a man wearing a yellow construction hard-hat and pushing a collapsible luggage dolly with a Magnavox 4-Head VCR on it, a device as obsolete as a brontosaurus.

Then came a well-weathered fellow named Omar, who was carrying his bedroll in a plastic bag and eating a frankfurter buried in free condiments.

When we started chatting, I doubted that he could have been named -- as he claimed -- for the debonair actor Omar Sharif, but the bearded man laughed and said, "That other Omar's way older than me."

Omar told me that he had been spending his nights at a shelter a few blocks from the Capitol building, and that he was a trained electrician who had become addicted to -- and now was free from -- an especial and debilitating fondness for Budweiser beer.

He was going to spend the afternoon reading Newsweek, he said, then he would try to find some money for another hot dog for dinner, and he was hoping to get his paperwork in order "to get on disability for stress."

That was the sort of story one hears a lot on the sidewalk outside the big library on a Monday or a Tuesday when the building opens late.

Monday Jan. 16, of course, is Martin Luther King Day and it won't open at all.

The King Library is a four-storey building robed in black glass, famous as the final work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It is situated within a block of the International Spy Museum, the theatre where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, the Smithsonian's American Art Museum, and the Verizon Center where the Capitals and Wizards play.

There is a bust of Dr. King in the entrance, large photographs of him above the check-out desk, and a colourful mural in the central hall that shows him leading the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, making his "I have a dream" speech in 1963, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and being guided from above by Mahatma Gandhi.

"Outdated eyesore or modern masterpiece?" asked The Washington Post, about five years ago

Waiting for the doors to open the other day, I asked a young man named Dont'a -- he pronounced it dawn-TAY -- if Doctor King's life still held any meaning, 44 long years after he was shot down in Memphis, Tennessee.

"He opened doors that had been closed to us," Dont'a said. "He said that if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."

Dont'a told me that he was not homeless -- he had a place to go at night -- but that he was having no luck finding employment, even as the Washington region's jobless figures hovered among the least-bad in the country. He was wearing hipster glasses and a toque and matching scarf that said GUCCI, and he was going to go inside and "check my Yahoo!" to see if any openings had come up.

Propped against van der Rohe's confection, meanwhile, was a blue-eyed man from Oakland, California -- I wasn't offered a name -- who was tipping the meagre contents of a discarded cigarette butt into a TOP Brand rolling paper and twirling this into a fresh new smoke as thin as a finishing nail.

This man told me that his 18-month window to apply for unemployment insurance had run out and that he had no idea what he could do about it. He had a beard that was almost as long as his arm, and tucked into his canvas backpack was a piece of cardboard on which he had written the words GOVERNING WELFAR UNSUITABL.

The Californian showed me his knuckles, which were cracked open with blood oozing out, and he said, "I guess that's frostbite."

"Why are you in Washington?" I asked him.

"I don't really have a 'Why am I in Washington,'" the blue-eyed man replied.

Now it was precisely noon, and there was a rustling of duffels and shopping bags as Washington's invisible people bunched and shuffled toward the open door. I went to say goodbye to Omar, and to tell him that I'd probably see him again, because I often come down here to talk to the folks who are waiting for the library to open, and to give thanks that my own life has not taken such a turn, at least not yet.

"All I can do is pray," the homeless man smiled in parting.

"What do you pray for?" I asked.

"I pray for other people," Omar said. "That's how you get blessings to come."

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 14, 2012 J6