Pepitas

These birds are selfish: I break up a pecan -a nut- to feed them, the small, brownish sparrows. They taste a few pieces, but they'd rather not eat.

I watch them snatch food out of their fellow sparrows' beaks rather then indulge in the crumbs freely given to them. Another few stretch out their wings and chirp at a the bigger black birds. Not having seen this type of behavior before, I was even more fascinated to see them gladly place their morsels in the sparrows' open beaks!

What a curious lot.

Now they seem to be watching me.

Cuscús

Curious drab, colored birds dropped in from nowhere and stayed close to me, like the children on the street in Mexico, with the persistent hope that I would give them any morsel, even by accident.

Here, in San Francisco, there are no such children: there is no innocence here.

No, what drops in on you are loud, ugly toothless homeless men who don't go away until you recognize they're human, too- some of them.

But such is the sad music of the street here, where nostalgia is but a gift.

--

Unos pájaros grises y curiosos salieron de la nada y se me acercaron como los niños de la calle en México, con esperanzas persistentes de que les diera algo, lo que fuera, aunque fuera por descuido.

Aquí, en San Francisco, no hay tales niños- aquí no hay inocencia.

No, aquí se te aparecen hombres ruidosos, feos y chimuelos que no se te despegan hasta que se les reconocen como seres humanos- algunos, pues.

Pero tal es la música triste de estas calles, donde la nostalgia es un regalo.

Chorizo Sandwich

I'm sitting, and I sit upon a chair and my feet rest on maybe a foot of concrete. There is a speed bump that transmits the weight of each car through the concrete, shaking it, up through my feet.

It feels unsafe.

At the very least, it's not a comforting feeling: as if the firmament upon which one stands will suddenly break under the weight of distant and transient, but very present, giants.

And still, people carry on as if this were normal, and I'm distracted by the revelatory details of a sago palm planted in a concrete planter here in this San Francisco shopping mall.