Sweet peas and dyed eggs this sunny, breezy morning. You know how rare it is that something works out just in time for a kid, like by magic? Today was one of those days. It was Julia's final soccer game of the season, a season in which she has improved but still normally is not aggressive enough to make much of a difference to the outcome of her game.
Today, her team had been shut out up until the final moments of the first half, when Julia and a teammate charged the opposing goal with the ball. Her colleague, a superb ball handler, drew the defenders to him, then slid a perfect pass across the goal box to Julia, who was open.
She kicked. She scored. Her first goal ever!
Hours later, after the traditional, season-ending pizza party, and our return home, which always immediately leads to her changing clothes, she is still wearing her medal.
***
Driving through this city lately, I've become acutely aware of how much drug dealing is occurring around San Francisco. Today, in the Inner Sunset, a saw an Asian man in an expensive car pull up to a double-park next to a park, where one guy among a group of Latinos and blacks men emerged to speak into the man's open window.
"Cocaine?"
Outside a comics shop a few blocks away, a street woman, her nose all but obliterated from falls or beatings or both, her dirty blond hair tied in a ragged mule's tail, her pants unsnapped, her shirt ragged, was holding her heavily scarred arms out as she accosted passersby, demanding money.
"Heroin," she explained in a rare moment of sanity before shuddering all over and beginning her verbal assault all over again, screaming ever louder as pedestrians shrank away from her, glancing back only to make sure she wasn't trailing them.
A white woman in a white car pulls up in front off an apartment in the Mission, honks a couple times, and a heavyset, Latino man who always wears his baseball cap backwards, hustles down the steps to hand a bag through her window in return for her rolled up greenbacks.
Further down the same block, a black man with his baseball cap sideways, paces, his cell phone glued to one ear. Suddenly a car whirls around the corner; its windows are all darkened so that one cannot glimpse the race or gender of the driver. The man runs to the driver's window; they make their exchange, and the darkened vehicle speeds away.
Down at 24th street, an enormously fat Asian man stands with some other men at a corner store. His cell phone rings; he rounds a corner into Balmy Alley, where a skinny Latino man openly hands him cash in return for a small plastic bag. The fat dealer doesn't even make a pretense of hiding his role in the community. As he waddles back to his corner spot, he openly counts the 100-dollar bills for all to see.
Into a retail electronics store walks a man of undetermined age or ethnicity, dressed in raggedly clothes, not the sort of customer you would expect to running up a credit card bill by buying a bunch of fancy equipment. The security guard eyes him as he scoops up several items, then joins the checkout line, shaking perceptibly.
When it comes his turn to pay, he pulls out not a credit card, but an enormous roll of bills. He counts out several hundred in twenties, then places his purchases in his backpack and returns to the streets. The security guard pays him no heed because he's already eyeing a group of four or five black teenagers, wearing gangbanger accoutrements who are scooping up several large, expensive boxed appliances.
The biggest and fattest of the boys, a fellow who weighs easily 450 pounds, pulls out a ludicrous roll of crisp 100-dollar bills to pay for this booty, and the rest of the kids lug their stuff out of the store. The security guard checks their recipt against the goods, then watches to make sure none of them circle back into the store after they exit. He shrugs his shoulders as he catches my eye.
He waves me out without checking my receipt, either. (I had paid for my modest purchases by credit card.) "Have a nice day," he said, kindly, the first words he'd spoken in a while.
-30-
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