And the baby, doused in ice-tea. It’s a damn shame he’s too young to remember because that scenario pretty much gives him a bullet proof vest for life. Honestly, how many times can something like that happen to a person, especially if you’ve had a drink thrown in your face before you could walk? One wonders whether the dad will share the story, and if so, whether he will do it justice.

But really, the most sad and compelling character is, of course, the drink propelling woman. What a tenuous, web-thin filter she has. There is so much more to her story than over caffeinated impulse control issues. But what? What is it with her? Her mother may know.

You tell it so well, Flan; it is petty and ugly, but aren’t we all? Some of us are just better at hiding it. I think if one didn’t observe with what you call a sense of “empathy and wonderment,” one would have no choice but to ignore the whole morass, put on blinders, plug our ears and hum furiously. What could be more depressing than watching ourselves crash through life with such little grace?

Thank you, my friend, for that gem.

A few weeks ago I was window walking the shops in San Francisco’s Marina neighborhood. I was nosing around a bookstore when the heckling cry of an incessant car alarm drove me outside. A crowd had gathered around a green Land Rover. Among them was the car’s owner, a thirty-something with a hip zipper jacket and a baby strapped to his chest. Seems he’d left the rear hatch ajar for his dog and hence, oops, the unkind racket. But the crowd gathered not to chastise but to inform, to tattle, to tell him something else. Apparently a lady, who had been walking by with an elderly woman, tossed a full coffee on the guy’s windshield. One look and yep—coffee everywhere. And what’s more: She’s still here, they said, pointing. She’s sitting outside at the café right over there! Off the guy went, eschewing the safety of the crosswalk for a diagonal right to the perp herself and what looked, by any best guess, her gray-haired mother next to her. An argument ensued. A few shouts and lashing curses. And then the woman tossed an entire glass full of iced-tea on the man and, oh yes drama lovers, his baby. Things wound down from there. The police (and by police I mean three of the most conspicuous undercover men I’ve ever seen, including movie parodies) got involved. And I stood motionless for about ten minutes, trying to take it all in and measure it up. What goes through someone’s mind? One person toting a baby to a street shout down. The other losing gravitational control of her beverage for the second time in minutes, throwing a drink at a baby, with the person that likely raised her as a baby looking terrified of what was happening and what the world had become. The petty ugliness of it all. And we all saw it. Maybe a few dozen of us on that temperate San Francisco afternoon. None of us will ever forget.