Scenes from public spaces, a while back

Behind my mask I forget about people watching. About what it’s like to sit lazily and listen. I remember people I don’t know:

The teacher who ran into three female students wearing big gold hoops on Valencia Street. They tell her about a kid who got in trouble in their class that day. “It’s racism playing out like we discussed in class, girls,” she says. “Black and Brown boys don’t get power anywhere else so when they can fight they’re going to fight,” she says. “Maybe we can change that,” she says, and they hug her goodbye, and then she calls them back so she can buy them chocolate croissants at Craftsman and Wolves. 

The guy on the 33 bus at 8:45 pm with a carefully packed rolling shopping bag, carefully dressed in a black sweatshirt, carefully eating something fried out of a plastic bag using his duffel bag as a table, carefully wiping the corners of his mouth. When he’s done eating, he pulls out what looked like a photocopy of a book page with a childish font at the top. He photocopies pages from library books during the day, rides the bus all night, until it ends at the terminal out by the VA.

The tall Black man with sunglasses, headphones, and a bucket hat on the 21 bus who asks a kid next to him to get up in case old people need to sit. The kid has been reading Harry Potter through glasses, a dream student, and gets up silently, nervously, wondering what he has done wrong. The man speaks in soft smooth tones to a brittle old lady in a purple sweater “How you doing - oh you know, keeping busy - ain’t that right.” He likes to wander North Beach, he tells me, walking 6 blocks up and 6 blocks back again. He was born and raised in San Francisco, and gets too homesick to leave for good.