Off at 12th and Locust, 8:27, underground to tilt my street level southbound on Broad for a day at Fels.

En route, rustling. Quick stop: South Beach Diet corporation, purveyor of tree-nut-free, hand-to-mouth, foot-to-pavement breakfast products - good morning to you, my friend.

Onward. Purposeful purple flats jostle golden-arched sugar packets; must have been there yesterday, day before? Have there been sugar exchanges already, not yet quarter of 9 on a Thursday? I think of a Linda I've known, the most loyal of a pack of Bridgeton McDonald's 5am coffee clients; teens should all work bakeries in their teens to meet this breed, to learn of the routine-riding 50, 60-somes who sugar unabashedly as they genuflect to the gods of shitty husbands past.

I shuffle, hustle, lotioned and bruiseless, kicking hashbrown wrappers, hollow Newport husks, Marlboros, Pall Malls, et. al. Til across the bridge in the evening, for me, my sticky wrapper remains in pocket, but I see and crinkle and feel akin. Broad Street pedestrians, here we are now.


A few blocks from point B, Baldi Funeral Home looms, a stoic, still meeting place for an early handful of mourners, presumably family, though tough to distinguish by grief here. Its face seems obstinate against the cold, with its heavy doors, its windows of varied dimensions, the whole of it garnished with pressed black suits, starched black skirt sets, sunglasses, handkerchiefs, initials and vowels.


Settle in quick! Thursday morning meeting: "Paperwork paperwork."

"What about paperwork? When you think about paperwork...paperwork."

"Well, paperwork, yeah. Paperwork for sure."


Break for lunch, and I, with my bastard nimble legs and chipper willingness, make a Simonetta's run like I've done it before, like I know, and like I belong. Order by composition; confirm cryptic, in-group, letter-digit ID; pay, tip, do not pass go. Yet still, I stand aside, a spectator to the cheek kisses of '148 familiarity.

Verbatim, I submit: "Yo, RITA! Next time you come, bring me some business cards? People always wanna know who took the picture there, and I let 'em know it's you, but I'd like to have a card to give 'em, you know?"

Said picture, one of many regionally standard shots of some Italian dude beaming over some Italian kid, but here, I'm rather taken by the effect. Dad surrounds me, beaming, as I give him a buck a sandwich in the tip jar. Nonchalant offers to supply fixin's in a Ziploc-brand side baggie? That's a family touch, like he's apt to tuck it next to a pudding cup; that's something my mustached dad would do.


Resume. Juggle juggle, format and such, Excel and Joomla and Word, and so forth, and so on.


4:30 comes and I'm pitied, "You can go home," and then, I'm more grateful for the relief than I'd been as afternoon shift girl for Daybreak Coffee Linda; I'm as thankful as a kid can be, though I know I'm grown and now a desk jockey, giddy for a sliver of day on South Broad.


Skyline sighted, heading back up, I pass a McDonald's, from which I presume the morning's detritus. Halted in front, 'Caucasian' by self-identity, I'm sure, brunette with musty gray at the roots, bundled just shy of a survival tinge (as we have all tended to be, more or less, through this frigid spell) - a woman stands. She's rolled a pick-less suitcase with able wheels in tow up close. Her face hovers all but literally pressed to the Play Place window. She watches intently at each effort, each shriek. Absorbing each image of each child in frames as they climb along braided jungle gym boughs, roll amongst the plastic balls, she stares, and I'm her. I'm so her. Not, today, in the literal, birthing sense of the sentiment, but in my empathy for her caricatured portrait of "yearn." I won't photograph; the thought doesn't cross my mind until I'm gone. She longs, and I long. My day will come, or it won't, but I know neither for sure, and therein lies the grandeur. Her day seems faded, penciled in on a calendar that's been long recycled into UArts pamphlets, Xpress Food Mart postings, fliers for parents of babies of children of my age, babies of beggingly juicy, throbbing parts, vulgar really, but sanctified by intent and community and funerals.

I grant myself a back glance, one parting glimpse of now, before I fall again under the literal sparkle of Center City. 5:00 and change, northbound and upward, I continue.