“Do you just paint here or try to sell your paintings, too?” Standing on a busy corner between I-80 and Costco, with brush in hand, stood a fifty year old black man in a long coat, applying a little depth to the green and white seas that held up his three-masted schooner.
“I do a little of both,” he said, hoping to make a quick sale on the spot. “May I take your photograph?” I asked, camera in hand. “I usually only grant one,” he said, no doubt expecting a sales loss, “but go ahead.” I used to paint on San Pablo Avenue, but no one paid me any attention.” “Have you had any luck today?” I asked. “I ran out of luck”, he replied, “after the Oakland fire, but I do accept donations.” A fair trade.
The check out lines at Costco in December were as long as the word, s-w-e-a-t-e-r, I was adding in Words With Friends when the man behind me asked, “If you call a person who works in tech a ‘techie’, what do you call a person who plays games on his phone?” I smiled before he finished. “You’re sharp,” he said. I feigned amusement. “I’m a wood carver”, he continued, “and you can use toothpaste on the end of a grinding wheel to polish blades until they shine.” I didn't know that. “I’ve learned a lot from instructional videos on YouTube”, he said. I told him how I’d carelessly scratched the wheels of my new car by running over a curb, and that rather than pay $400 for two new wheels I went to YouTube and discovered that 60 grit sandpaper, a file, and a little Dremel grinding wheel could remove a lot of the damage. I bought the sandpaper, the file, and the grinding wheel. Just don’t look too close.
Costco doesn’t carry Honey Wheat Pretzels, so on the way home I stopped at a Lucky Supermarket in El Cerrito. An elderly Chinese man wearing over-the-ear headphones with a dangling cord came up to me in the snack aisle, holding a box of “Nutter Butter” cookies. “What’s in the middle?” he asked. “Peanut butter”, I said, “It’s a creamy kind of peanut butter.” A moment later he came back, holding a different box. “In the middle?” he asked. “It reads, ‘English Tea’, but I have no idea what that means in a cookie. It’s another cream filling.” Lucky is remodeling and either they no longer carry Honey Wheat Pretzels, or they weren’t snacky enough to be included among the one hundred different varieties of Oreos and Doritos. I turned and walked away. “What’s vanilla?” he yelled.
Close to home I was surprised to find a Kensington policeman stooped in the middle of Yale and Yale Circle, picking up what in another life had been a bag of groceries, his black and white Ford Explorer, red and blue lights flashing, parked behind him. Fearing that one of my elderly neighbors had been struck I stopped and asked him if there had been an accident. “No,” he replied. “Someone was delivering a bag of groceries, and they were all over the street. I’m trying to figure out who was supposed to get them. Whoever it is, they’ll be surprised when they’re delivered by their local constable. If these were supposed to go to an elderly person who depended upon them I couldn’t live with myself.”