You won't find it so hot

National Poetry Month is gone for this first year of pandemic, but it’s Friday, and May Day, when we turn to thoughts of the working class and revolution. This—despite all efforts of Cadet Bonespurs and his kleptocratic administration—is the United States of America, so there is no military hardware parade.

I’m feeling kind of Woodie Guthrie, and specifically his anthem for the migrants of the 1930s, who tried to find a better life outside the Dust bowl. This influx to California and the rough welcome they were given was documented in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, but no one reads that any more. However, in my childhood and youth, you could still hear that flat midwestern accent around Bakersfield and Fresno. And I recall sharply my mother dismissing those migrants as “Okies”.

Sadly, Guthrie’s point is still valid—if you don’t have the dough-re-mi, just keep on movin’, son.

This version is by John Mellencamp.

For the love of God, people—get out to the polls and vote in November.

Gratitude Monday: mundane beauty

A friend-of-a-friend on Facebook posts the most fascinating photos—shots he takes of things he sees on his morning walk to Peet’s Coffee (somewhere in Maryland, I’m a little vague on the particulars). Interesting patterns and textures—frozen puddles, shadows of tree branches and leaves against a wall, barely sprouting plants.

I always pause to really look at them, because they’re beautiful and mundane all at once. And they remind me that that beauty is all around us—if we care to look for it.

So the other day, as I was walking over to Whole Foods, mind chattering on at a rate of knots as usual, and paying no attention to the world around me, I stopped suddenly as a pattern of shadows penetrated my oblivion.

I looked, hauled out the camera that I used to deploy daily on my morning walks around The Valley They Call Silicon, and took the shot:

And then I looked beyond the stretch with the trees and saw a different pattern, just waiting patiently to be appreciated:

Today I’m grateful for the example of Barry and all his beautiful photos, reminding me that Maryland, Virginia, California—possibly even Iowa—there are wonders in the mundane, if I only choose to find them.

Resistance moon: Trying to show them our green cards

Today’s poem takes us to the heart of what’s happening under the current administration’s policies denying humanity to The Other—the black, the brown, the yellow, the red. Especially the psycthotic break towards Latinos: the rich, old, white Republicans somehow want all the donkey work (bussing restaurant tables and washing dishes; building additions to houses; landscaping and maintaining yards; cleaning office buildings; harvesting crops) done for less-than-living wages, and without importing laborers.

They demonize those who do this work, call them leeches on society, paint them with the “rapists and murderers” brush, and yet essentially give the individuals and businesses that hire them a bonus for maximizing their cost savings. (Along with, by the way, avoiding contributing taxes into the system, with their under-the-table cash payments to the laborers.)

Blas Manuel de Luna was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and worked alongside his parents, brothers and sisters in the agricultural fields of California’s San Juaquin Valley (whence comes a cornucopia of produce that goes out to the nation and the world). 

If farmers had to pay workers a living wage, we’ve been told for at least a hundred years, they couldn’t afford to stay in business. So, every salad we toss, every handful of almonds or walnuts we snack on, every cherry, peach, tomato and other summer pleasure we savor comes off the backs of men, women and children who work double-digit hours per day for heartbreakingly low amounts of money, under the ever-present threat of visits from La Migra if they complain about anything.

Even decades after the dedicated work of César Chávez, neither conditions nor pay has improved much for these workers, as de Luna well knows. He managed to leave the fields physically, earning degrees in English from Cal State Fresno, and an MFA from the University of Washington, but they’ve stayed with him. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin for a while, but now teaches English at a high school in California. I don’t expect “Bent to the Earth” really needs much of an introduction. But consider its truths when you consume anything that was produced by campesinos in the fields or obreros in the cities.

“Bent to the Earth”

They had hit Ruben

with the high beams, had blinded

him so that the van

he was driving, full of Mexicans

going to pick tomatoes,

would have to stop. Ruben spun

the van into an irrigation ditch,

spun the five-year-old me awake

to immigration officers,

their batons already out,

already looking for the soft spots on the body,

to my mother being handcuffed

and dragged to a van, to my father

trying to show them our green cards.

They let us go. But Alvaro

was going back.

So was his brother Fernando.

So was their sister Sonia. Their mother

did not escape,

and so was going back. Their father

was somewhere in the field,

and was free. There were no great truths

Vox dei

As everyone on the planet knows, it’s Election Day here in America, the last chance that states controlled by Republicans have to disenfranchise voters who they fear might not cast their ballots for Republican candidates. This exercise has been a bit of a challenge as some of those jurisdictions have had early voting, and they’ve been forced to find multiple long-term ways of closing polling places, limiting hours and otherwise harassing the electorate into giving up.

California, of course, would not be one of these states. In California, you get voting materials in multiple languages (in Los Angeles County that would be Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Korean, Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai and Hindi), and they’ve been encouraging voting by mail for a long time. Whenever I went to my polling place in the Valley They Call Silicon, I’d very often be the only person there, surrounded by eight precinct workers overjoyed to have something to do. I often had to stop them tearing off half a roll of “I voted” stickers; they were just so pleased to have someone to give them to.

(In the Commonwealth of Virginia, on the other hand, if you want to cast your ballot before Election Day, you have to basically get a note from your mommy explaining why you should be excused from the long lines and scrutiny of Republican poll monitors. Like you’re going to be in another continent, or will be undergoing triple bypass surgery. If you’re performing triple bypass surgery, you still have to vote in person.)

So when I considered my electoral options this year, I called the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters and requested an absentee ballot.

Because—aside from everything else—no state in the country gives such good ballot as California.

This is because of the state’s practice of submitting initiatives (voter-originated) and referenda (legislature-originated) measures to the general electorate for us to approve or dustbin. You know: vox populi, vox dei.

Every election I’ve ever experienced in California has had at least one proposition about marijuana and one about prisons. Without fail. This year is no different. Proposition 64 is asking for the legalization of recreational marijuana, Propositions 62 and 66 are to do with the death penalty and Proposition 57 is about criminal sentencing, parole and juvenile criminal proceedings.

There’s also a measure (Prop. 60) requiring actors in porn films to use condoms; one (Prop. 56) directing cigarette tax income to fund healthcare tobacco use prevention, research and law enforcement; and one (Prop. 63) restricting the size of gun magazines that can be sold in the state. (Man, I am not sorry to be missing the NRA-funded ads on that one.)

Ditto the Big Pharma propaganda against Prop. 61, which puts caps on prices the state will pay for drugs. Between anti-Prop. 63 and Prop. 61 ads, enough money will have been dropped up and down the state to build and equip state-of-the-art K-12 schools into the next decade. But instead it’ll go to trying to bamboozle the electorate.

America, goniff.

Here’s the one this time around that I’m most tickled about: Proposition 59. That’s the one that instructs whichever Congressmorons we send to Washington to use their authority to overturn the Citizens United decision, via whatever means necessary, up to and including a constitutional amendment.

Yes, I know that it’s more symbolic than actionable—serving much the same purpose as a warning shot across the bow or the rattle of a diamondback. But California has been a bellwether state for decades, and as she goes, eventually so goes the nation. This is a way of serving notice that we are mad as hell and we’re not fixing to take it much longer.

But here’s something else I love about California: both candidates for the US Senate are Democrats, women and the daughters of immigrants. (Kamala Harris’s parents from India and Jamaica, Loretta Sanchez’s from Mexico.) My choices for the House of Representatives are both Asian-American, one who’s been doing a great job already and one who wants to undo it all.

I also love that, even though the Registrar of Voters has never once got my name spelt right (even after one of the many people I spoke with throughout September and October keyed in the correct spelling), no one has ever tried to use that anomaly to try to turf me out of the polling place. All this “voter fraud” crap? Not California, baby.

So, commiserations to those who have to put up with the shenanigans of those who’ve forgotten that this republic was founded in reaction to arrogant and autocratic politicians, and deep thanks to your perseverance in making your will known by whatever means your jurisdiction has set forth. They may not be listening; they may in fact need their hearing checked. Today is the day when We the People have our say.

And We the People of California get to say a whole freakin’ lot.

Plated up

As you know, I love sussing out stories from my surroundings. And as a fourth-generation Californian, I look to motor vehicles as extensions of people’s personal narratives. Whether it’s stating practical capabilities, asking the big questions or going Mitty, your vanity plate is more than just an tag. It’s like a DMV equivalent of a hashtag, actually.

In the Old Dominion, of course, people are somewhat less inclined to be, um, freewheeling than on the west coast. Long after Californians had been pushing the envelope for raging against the Man (or whatever), Virginians were spending extra to have their initials on their plates. If they were making long-term bets on their marriages, they’d have his-n-hers initials.

These days they’re opening up some, as I’ve noted before. And you're more likely to find sweetness and light, as in this nature lover:

But here’s someone living on the edge:

And I’m thinking that the guy who let this one get out of the state pen didn’t know anything about Aleister Crowley. Probably thought it was the applicant’s mama's name.

Even so, the award for taking the piss goes to this person back in my home state:

That’s what I call making a statement.

California, here I go

As of 0915 today (Lord willing and Virgin America for once taking off on time), I have ceased to be a resident of California. For two months I shall reside in the District They Call Columbia, within spitting distance of Congressmorons and other lowlifes, while I explore the area and decide where I’d like to live on a more permanent basis.

During this time I’ll be living out of suitcases and bin bags. For a couple of weeks, I’ll even be without a car, until mine catches up with me. That’ll make me feel terribly urban, I can tell you. And very un-Californian.

But I can use that time to find my way on foot around the city, get my feet under the desk (when my employers find me one), and generally reorient myself.

What a slice.

Really mean streets

Y’all know how I like to keep up on matters ophidian, wherever in the world they might be or whatever the season. In a pinch, I’ll go with performing crocodiles.

And—as you know—I do not make any of this stuff up.

And it’s my own home town, the great city of Los Angeles that gives me the most recent adventure, because it seems that an albino cobra went on the lam for four days, before it was taken into custody by authorities.

Four days, folks. Four long, hot and anxious days.

(The snake might look something like this.)

It turns out, according to killjoy WaPo, that this particular serpent isn’t so much albino as leucistic (meaning it lacks pigment, but has blue eyes instead of pink). 

However, I don’t believe you’d think that particular hair worth splitting if you came across the cobra in question on your way home from your gang initiation or the medical marijuana dispensary.

Civic confusion

Tuesday was the day Primary elections were held in the great state of California, and there's nothing like it anywhere else.

I have to say that the method of marking ballots here is passing strange. First of all: paper ballots, no voting machines. In a state that considers itself the vortex of technological innovation. 

And the ballots? No filling in a circle, or—God forbid—punching out a hole with a slender metal prong. (“You’ll poke yer eye out, kid!”. Plus, the two most terrifying words in all of electoral history: hanging chads.) No—we have to connect the front end and the back end of an arrow-like thingie.

But not just any old way—a very specific, singular way, as you can see from this instruction sheet.

Now, I find this quite interesting. For one thing, all the sample candidates are all dead white males. I’m assuming that George Washington, Ben Franklin and Andrew Jackson need no introduction. John B. Weller was the fifth governor of California; can’t imagine how that qualifies to sit in the same company as Washington, Jackson or Franklin. William M. Gwin was one of our first Congressmen; but I imagine his gold-mine wealth propelled both that career and his placement on this sheet.

I always think of John C. Frémont as one of the dreadful political generals of the Union army who held high commands with disastrous results during the early years of the War Between the States. (Stonewall Jackson’s “foot cavalry” ran Frémont ragged in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862, which in turn frightened the daylights out of the Federal government in nearby Washington, D.C.) But he was one of our first U.S. Senators, and a founder of the Republican Party, so what’re ya gonna do?

Anyhow, evidently in our entire 164 years of statehood, there has been no woman and no person of color in the Golden State who has done anything as remarkable as Frémont, Gwin or Weller that would spark the Office of the Secretary of State (which manages election stuff) to use his/her name as an example here.

But the little instruction sheet is overly optimistic, in my opinion. Because I’m pretty sure that people who can’t figure out the right-turn-on-red thing will not be able to pick the correct marking method from among all the options that this thing gives you on marking your ballot. 

Now that I think of it, this may be the reason California does not use voting machines, either.

I am the rainmaker

As you may know, California is in the throes of a major drought—worst and longest spell of dryness since…well, that depends on your source. But last year the state received less rain than in any year since achieving statehood in 1850, and this past January was the driest on record.

This is serious business for the most populous state in the country, with a huge economic investment in agriculture. Not to mention housing developments and all those swimming pools.

Serious enough that Governor Jerry Brown has signed legislation to provide $687 million in drought relief and President Barack Obama has promised $183 million for relief as well. Plus—churches have been praying up a storm (so to speak) and native tribes have been dancing for clouds, too.

But apparently if you want it to rain around here, you just put on a technology conference in San Francisco that I’m going to attend. Because that involves me walking the seven or so blocks from the CalTrain terminus to Moscone Center, and back again. And this, in turn, sparks gully-washers. It does.

Back in November, I went to the Salesforce.com user conference (called DreamForce). There had not been a drop of rain in the entire Bay Area for months. I dressed in business casual, since my intention was networking, and I did not bother with an umbrella.

(Look, I grew up in LA. I don’t think I ever owned an umbrella until I lived in a country with monsoons, and I just never got down with carrying them. When I lived in the UK I stowed umbrellas in my desk at work, my car, my briefcase and my gym bag, and I hung one on the door knob on the front door to my flat. I’d still hare out into pissing-down rain without an umbrella because it just wasn’t in my genetic make up to remember to actually, you know, pick it up.)

It was beginning to shower when I boarded the train in Mountain View, but I thought, “Oh, SF has its own micro-climate; it won’t be raining there. I’ll be fine.”

What an idiot. It poured.

By the time I got to registration at Moscone East, I looked like Tammy Faye Bakker after the fall. (I’d put on mascara and all, on account of that networking thing.) My hair was dripping and my clothes stuck to my body. I was completely icky.

And just as I finally got more or less dried out walking through the expo, I was drenched again running back to the train station.

And that was the one day of rain we got in months.

But I saw A Pattern developing when, two weeks ago I heard weather guessers predicting a storm headed our way last week. “Oh, of course there is,” I said. “I’m going to the RSA Conference.”

Well, so it happened. Nothing until Wednesday, the first day I was headed up there; but quite a good rainfall on the day. This time, however, I did take an umbrella with me, which got some serious use. Walking both to and from the expo, it was just chucking it down. (And it continued through the night.)

It rained a little on Thursday, when I went back up to meet a friend for breakfast and make another round of the expo. And then it rained again heavily on Friday and some on Saturday.

I have to say that it was lovely watching it come down after months and months of relentlessly unremitting cloudless skies. And I love listening to the drops splatting against the skylight and kitchen window. It just makes me feel like there’s a natural kind of wash/rinse cycle going on for us all.

Especially in the Valley they call Silicon, where all the cars kick up more dust than you can imagine.

The rain has indeed been refreshing (although locals grumble about it; I’ve noticed that they take anything less than sheer cloudless perfection personally, as though someone’s abrogated their “But I’m living in California” contract). Although everyone’s warning that it hasn’t made a dent in the drought and grim days are still ahead.

Yep—long ways to go. But it’s rain, for crying out loud. Actual rain, enough to wash some of the grime off the car and the dust from my brain. The Stevens Creek Reservoir (one of my walking areas) has gone from this (mid-February):

To this (Saturday):

Yes, you could still walk across the reservoir, but this time at least you’d get your ankles wet. Baby steps, you know?

I'm really glad for several days of rain in a dry, dusty landscape. And I’m happy to do my bit along with the churches and tribes to bring it about. I’ll check the Moscone calendar to see if there are any other conferences of interest coming up.

My fellow Californians—you're welcome.

More gratitude: Making mochi

Thinking about the Dyo family, here’s another thing I recall from my childhood.

Every year on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s, the Dyos hosted a huge mochi-making event for the Japanese-American community of Los Angeles. Their backyard, which was also the base for their landscaping business, was the perfect size for such an industrial-scale operation.

(If you don’t know mochi—it’s basically steamed rice ground up into a paste and shaped into little cakes, dusted with cornstarch. Sometimes it’s wrapped around sweet bean paste.)

(And apparently MSFT Word spellchecker does not know mochi because it keeps autocorrecting to mocha. Turkey.)

Scores of families from all over the area brought rice to be steamed over bonfires in barrels, and then smashed up and made into mochi to last through the next year. The deal was the men managed the steaming and smashing, the women made all the cakes around huge paper-covered tables sprinkled liberally with corn starch.

There was also udon—broth, noodles, chicken, chopped scallions and seaweed to be assembled as you pleased and slurped up. (And galvanized metal tubs full of sodas in bottles, which was a huge treat for me because we never had soda in our house, ever. Oh—and you needed a bottle opener to get the caps off the sodas. And of course you had to look out for the dinosaurs and primordial ooze because this was so long ago.) I was kind of suspicious about those seaweed sheets, but they turned out to be okay.

The kids basically ran wild throughout the back yard, which was part plant nursery, part equipment lot.

The first year we went they were just shifting from the old method of two men rhythmically pounding the rice in alternating strokes with wooden mallets, but they had a couple of demos. The men would go smack-smack; then, while they were raising the mallets, a woman would reach in really quickly with a couple of rice paddles and kind of flip the rice mush around so that the next strokes would squash a different part.

She was really, really fast. The whole thing was like some finely-tuned machine operating.

But most of the rice went from the steamer baskets to gas-powered rice grinders (yes, actual rice grinders). They had several going, and men tended them, running each batch of rice through several times to get it to the right state of smashedness.

When that state was achieved, the basket of paste would be hurried over to one of the tables, the name of the family whose rice it was announced, and the women would start pinching off little balls of it, rolling them in the cornstarch and patting them into little round bite-sized cakes.

Everyone worked at a speed of knots, but in both operations—male and female—there was a robust continuo of chatter, gossip, joking and camaraderie, in a mixture of English and Japanese. Occasionally, as I hovered at one of the tables, producing the most pathetic misshapen mochi ever to emerge to face the light of day, there was enough English for me to get the gist of it. But there was a whole lot of laughter, which warmed that December day.

(And no, I am not exaggerating about how awful my little cakes were. Someone would surreptitiously take one of my products and give it a few pats and rolls while it was still warm enough to be malleable, and make it presentable. I have the same problem making onigiri—I just don’t seem to be able to get it compact enough.)

I’ve never developed a taste for mochi, even though it’s basically just squashed rice, and I like rice fine. But udon, now…

Back when I was working with a lot of sales teams for a data networking hardware manufacturer, one of the account managers came to town and took one of my colleagues and me out to lunch. It was a miserable, rainy cold day in Northern Virginia, and we went to a Japanese restaurant, where I ordered a nice bowl of steamy udon. We were deep in a discussion of the project in hand, and slurping our soup. I was in the middle of saying something pithy (no doubt) when I flashed back to the mochi-making days, interrupted myself and proclaimed:

“You know, when I was ten years old I’d never have imagined I’d be saying this, but this soup needs more seaweed.”

Maybe I should give mochi another try.

& boo to you, too

It seems to me that the Bay Area seems to have taken Halloween particularly to heart. There are costume shops that I swear stay open all year long on the back of the business they do in October. And houses are decorated almost as elaborately as at Christmas in other parts of the country.

I’m not talking a hay bale, two scarecrows and a flock of pumpkins; or even one of those witches splatted against the front of a house. I’m talking ghosts and skeletons hanging from trees, that nasty white cobweb stuff and strings of orange lights.

But even so, I was driving home the other morning and came across a house that bespeaks complete devotion to the principle that you can’t have too much ghoulishness on this day.

It’s not one of the McMansions, or anything. In fact, it’s your basic little suburban 50s box made of ticky-tacky. Although, since it’s in the Silicon Valley, it’s your basic little $795,900 suburban 50s box made of tick-tacky.

Anyhow: here’s what I saw whizzing past it:

So, of course I stopped and went to investigate.

And it went on...

And on...

I'm betting that there will be sound effects tonight. And that there will be some traumatized trick-or-treaters.

Road signs

I found myself behind one of those behemoth SUVs at a stoplight the other day. You know, one of those old-style ones that take up two parking spaces and get about 9 miles per gallon.

Then I noticed this:

After I took the shot, I backed the hell off.

Express bus to India

You have to understand that Silicon Valley is like Really New Delhi; the South Asian population in this area is upwards of 250K, and a UC Berkeley report indicates that one out of three engineers here is from the Sub-Continent.

Where I am in Sunnyvale, you can’t swing a cat-toy without hitting an Indian restaurant, sari shop or jewelry store. (I need to find out what it is about the jewelry.) And in future I’ll post pix of what I discover around here.

Meantime, I was headed home on El Camino Real when I saw this on the back of the #522 bus, the one running from Eastridge in San José to Palo Alto—right down the backbone of the Valley.

Definitely not in Kansas any more.

Tax dollars actually at work

I went trawling the Web to try to find any politician who doesn’t behave like our Congressmorons in D.C. And--imagine this, there is one.

I give you the mayor of Redondo Beach, Calif., a gay, Asian Republican who works with his constituents to maintain both a satisfactory level of services and a balanced budget.

I understand this is a solution that is not, as we say in the tech business, scalable. Mike Gin’s election didn’t come at a campaign cost of millions, so he didn’t have to sell his soul to multi-national corporations. Therefore he’s able to focus on, you know, the work and the outcomes to people who don’t pay his bills.

But, given what we’ve had to put up with for the past few weeks, months and years on a state and national level, I want to focus on the concept that elected officials can actually do right by the people who put them in office, even if it’s just in Surf City USA.

Carpocalypse diem

As with pretty much everything to do with Los Angeles, Carmageddon was hyped to the max. Shutting down the 405 (’scuse me, Interstate 405) over the weekend to demolish the Mulholland Drive overpass was supposed to bring about The End of Civilization As We Know It.

You have to understand, the 405 is one of the arteries of LA traffic; and to Angelenos, traffic is life. It doesn’t occur to anyone in the county that you could do anything—grocery shop, go to school, consult your aromatherapist—without getting in your car. In the run-up to this weekend hundreds of thousands of people were doubling up on their Prozac, stocking the pantry with emergency rations of Grey Goose and kvetching that it was going to be the mother of all nightmares if they closed the 405.

I’m betting that local news teams have been fanning the pre-closure terror for weeks, predicting gridlock and offering a gazillion ways to cope. (Like, get your liposuctioned bum out of your BMW and take a freaking walk?) Jet Blue offered flights from Van Nuys to Long Beach for $5, although why anyone would want to go to either place I don’t know.


There was even the obligatory re-subtitling of Hitler ranting about Carmageddon:

Well, turned out to be a bit of a damp squib. The streets of Westwood, Inglewood, Brentwood, etc., did not run with blood, and  there were no reports of increased numbers of murders. (Bank robberies might have been down, though; no quick getaway.)

Same thing happened during the 1984 Olympics. There were dire predictions that the city would shut down on account of all the extra traffic—between the Olympians, the visitors and all the limos. But for once the city and county governments actually conceived and executed a cogent plan,and for two weeks, it was actually easier to get around town.

Of course, it went back to hell as soon as the Closing Ceremony wrapped.

As for Carmageddon, the contractor actually finished the work early, and traffic has resumed on the 405. I fully expect that hell followed immediately thereafter.  

My deepest apologies

I was in Target this morning, picking up drawer liners and cleaning stuff. I was whining to myself about the new place I’m moving to—the property manager didn’t paint it as he’d said he would, and his idea of “the place is clean” is certainly not mine (ergo the Lysol). I was also fretting over how I’m supposed to fit all my stuff into the new flat and thinking, rather pitifully, that I’m just going to have to learn to live with less.

I chose a checkout lane where a couple’s purchases had just been rung up; didn’t want to wait at the other lanes where the cashiers were still scanning. And then I realized that there was some hang-up with the transaction.

And being the utterly impatient person I am, I was beginning to fume. Then the nature of the hold-up became clear: the customers didn’t have enough money for all the merchandise. They were choosing what items to put back.

A box of cereal was first; but that wasn’t enough. So a package of chicken wings or thighs went. And then they had enough.

They were in their fifties, maybe, and the woman’s cotton knit top was torn at the armhole. All their purchases, a full cart totaling around $75, were food,and there was cat kibble among them. They chose to return their food, not the cat’s.

As she collected a couple of dollars in change, the woman apologized to the cashier and to me; “We didn’t realize we’d gone so wild.” I said nothing because I didn’t know what to say; and I was ramping down from toe tapping to embarrassment. I paid for my drawer liners and Lysol and went on to the next errand.

But I couldn’t let it go. It pisses me off that people have to choose between feeding their pet and feeding themselves.

But mostly I’m pissed off at myself. I'd been so full of self-pity about fitting all my stuff (including whatever food I choose to have) into my new flat; and here was a situation that was really worth spending some sympathy on. But I screwed the pooch completely. 

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for me to buy that couple’s chicken and cereal and then just hand a bag to them in the parking lot. Might have been $10, maybe $12. I can afford it, even though I whinge about the miserable pay I'm getting. But I didn’t come up with that right response until I was miles away. Way too late.

I was so busy getting from impatience to shock that I never made it to compassionate action. And that’s an opportunity I’ll never get back.

So to the couple with a happy cat but maybe not such a great supper: I apologize for being slow and stupid. I’m truly ashamed of myself. I can’t help you now, but I’ll try my best to be quicker to catch on in future.