I found her at the cafe table where I'd left her only minutes before.
And I was too. You see, we'd finished that conversation which is now the gist of the last post and I'd shared my advice about wooden nickles and ankled away. Then I remembered the real reason I'd come looking for her in the first place.
"Still here," she said, "but If you have a long story, it will have to wait until our next appointment. I'm meeting friends in the Castle Street Arts District."
"You'll have time for me, you young geezer," I said. The remark was made in the warmest, most loving way of course.
"Walk and talk," she said getting up from the cafe table and heading uptown.
"What's happening on Castle Street?" I asked.
"No time for that now," she said. "You'll have to wait for tomorrow's Star News and read about it there."
"Big stuff," I said and was about to muse on it but she came to an abrupt stop, looked me in the eye, and said, "Talk."
"Ah, right," I said. "I need some advice about changes I want to make in my life. I've been struggling..."
"I know," she said.
"I practice all my power principles and yet I seem to make no progress. I'm beginning to feel that I'm stuck in some wormhole or other. Or maybe I've crossed over the horizon boundary of a black hole or whatnot."
"Well, I know how much you like to compare your life to quantum fields," she said, "but you're wasting subspace energy looking there. Your problem is that you've forgotten Fierce Qigong."
"Mankiller!" I said coming to an abrupt stop. You've been around these parts long enough to know that when I use this former shrimp's surname I mean business and I want it to show.
"Never do I forget Fierce Qigong. It's my raison d'ette."
She came to an abrupt stop. It was looking like a big day for abrupt stops. She turned around and took two slow steps toward me. I knew she meant business.
"What is the foundation of Fierce Qigong?" she asked.
It was a rhetorical question, of course, but I had a strange feeling that we were about to get somewhere and I thought it best to play along.
"Fierce Qigong is founded on taiji chuan," I said.
"Chen style," she said.
"To be sure," I said.
"And what is the principal difference between taiji chuan and kung fu?" she said. "Or should I say, wushu?"
"Wushu or even sip pal gi in case any of my Korean masters hear of this conversation."
"Genome! Put a sock in it! Back to the question; what's the difference between taiji and wushu?"
Well, checkmate, I thought. She'd done it again and with only two questions. Forget Sherlock Holmes, forget Jeeves; when this Lupe Louise Mankiller accepts an assignment her mysterious something works wonders.
"The difference is soft hands," I said. "Hands like water--soft and yielding and yet unstoppable; cutting through stone."
"Taking a relaxed approach," she said. "Never losing inner harmony. Performing the next best thing without striving and without planning the outcome."
"That's what I haven't been doing," I said.
"Rem acu tetigisti," she said.
"Fierce Qigong," I said. And I meant it too.