The next day, it was time to pass by Moses' doorway again.  I found myself wishing I could take an alternate route.

I couldn't.

I paused at the corner across the street from the accustomed doorway, turning my head as little as possible.  Somehow Moses was still there:  still standing, still alive.  The coat was nowhere in sight.

I had to hope that maybe he'd given it to somebody else—somebody who he knew could use it.

And it occurred to me that maybe Moses actually had a warm place to sleep, somewhere.   Or for all I knew, going around short-sleeved in the middle of winter might even have been part of his “style”—part of his way of impressing the other derelicts with how tough he was.  You hear stories about people adapting to all kinds of things.

For that matter, maybe the look he'd given me had been something deliberate—something  practiced and cultivated—a way of rattling unsuspecting workaday folk like myself.   How did I know the man wasn't fully capable of speech?  Hey, he could have later told his cohorts about the incident, and laughed his guts out about it:   "Boy, did I ever put the whammy on that guy!"

These were all, of course, just hopes. Just speculations.  The quintessential "maybe."

Maybe my grandmother was secretly the Pope.

Still, it was murderously cold out.  I had to hope for something.