Beans for Breakfast

I stop when I get to the corner and turn to look in the direction of a siren. An ambulance. Across the street a man is waving his arms. For a moment I think he’s going to wave down the ambulance, but it turns out that he’s really just trying to direct traffic. He holds [...]

I was leaving Broadway Market just as someone was heading inside. We went for the same door. I pushed the door open wide and squeezed past, while he maneuvered around me. He offered some parting words to the man he’d been walking with, and waved good-bye, turning toward the door. Then, while I was passing [...]

As I turned around to leave, I caught a peripheral glimpse of something moving in the water. I turned back and saw a school of enormous red fish heading in my direction at a leisurely pace, right beside the pier. (The schools of little fries that hang out near the piers always swim around aimlessly [...]

The Greenpeace folks work in pairs. Each pair is assigned a busy street, where the partners stand facing away from each other, a few yards apart. They wear matching green jackets or sometimes matching yellow polo shirts. Each holds a green binder under one arm. And as you walk past, the Greenpeace person who’s facing [...]

There are three campaigns cycled into service on an irregular schedule. One day the activists hold up signs that say, “Send dentists to jail.” Months later it’s, “Lawyers stink.” They hand out flyers that only repeat the slogans, there’s no explanation. The third campaign is slightly less ambiguous. The signs read, “Ban these books?” and [...]