I had just come to Washington, D.C. in the early 1960s fresh from school, and was temporarily working for a law firm while I waited for another job to come open. My work was not demanding, doing research for the lawyers, filing documents at agencies, but the law firm was a force in the city, and the job gave me my first entrée into the nation’s power structure. Every day I went to work and saw evidence that who you knew, and the kind of access you had, gave you influence over events. It seemed like an important lesson at the time, but it was not the only lesson I learned in the nine months I worked there.
There was a bank of four elevators in our building. They still had operators, then, and on every elevator ride to and from my office at the firm, I had a one in four chance of getting Rosa’s car. She was a small Puerto Rican woman, middle aged and no more than five feet tall, who favored red, and had very little English. Over the nine months I worked there, the luck of the draw often found me standing next to her as she sat on her stool, just inside of the sliding bronze doors, and chauffeured Washington’s elite up and down. The thing you noticed about her was her smile, and she was not selfish with it.
Publication history: New Age Journal Nov/Dec 1997
