Count on It

Part of my job is keeping the cash drawer stocked with small bills, which makes for a quick-trip to the bank every couple of days. The man who inevitably appears behind any window I choose is excruciatingly slow. He wears gold cuff links, and his shirts are impeccably pressed. His face looks young, but he is so serious and strangely clean that I would guess he's at least thirty. Usually I hand him a stack of twenties and ask for a certain number of ones, fives, and tens. He takes the bills from me in separate stacks and then walks over to the drawer. He works methodically and carefully, always following some version of this pattern:

Count bills, straighten stack, straighten tie, count bills, type on computer, straighten sleeves, straighten stack.

Then he walks over to a counting machine, puts the bills in, and removes them, only to repeat the whole thing. It's all very straight. Everyone else at the bank counts the money once while trying to convince me to open a new account. I prefer the cuff links guy.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

A little girl was lying over two seats when I got on the T today. Her father lifted her up to make room for a huge crowd of people that had just boarded.

"Where is that music coming from?" she asked him.

"Someone's headphones," he answered. "The train doesn't have it's own soundtrack."

"Yes it does," I thought. Just ask Pauline. (Start with 3:15-5:25.)

Little Kid and a Motor Scooter

Seeing a child alone on the street is pretty uncommon in Boston's Back Bay. It causes an it-takes-a-village-sleuth-response in me, and I have to stop and search a moment, wondering where the attendant might be. During the snow last week, I saw a little kid standing next to a parked Vespa, no chaperone in sight. He was all bundled up. It looked like he must be waiting for somebody - the owner of the scooter? He brushed the snow away as it landed, making sure to keep the shiny, yellow panels clear.

Twenty minutes later, when I made my way back to the place where he stood, the boy was helping a man shovel, but the scooter was gone.

Keeping up with the Joneses

During the snow this weekend, one of the stores across the street sent a man outside to shovel the huge sidewalk in front of it. The ground he covered made a perfect outline of the width of his store, and he did not color outside the lines. When he was finished, he went back out to sprinkle salt all over it. Ten minutes later, a man from the next store appeared and scraped away his snow. The next time I looked out, I saw a guy emerge from the store on the other side of the first, all bundled up and extremely reluctant, busted red shovel in hand.

The fascinating part of all this is that there was less than one inch of snow on the ground.

Help for the Homeless

There was a guy standing outside Au Bon Pain soliciting customers on their way in.

"Do you have a moment to help the homeless?"

He caught the person right before me, so I was off the hook. I watched him while I sat in the front window of the shop. He stood in a ski jacket under the falling snow, with hat and mittens and clipboard. After a while, he was approached by a rugged man in a cotton army jacket, with a sand-colored bag spilling out over his shoulder. He was unkempt and under-dressed. I watched their confrontational body language at first, but eventually I could hear their conversation through the thick glass wall.

"So you have some money for me, then?" Asked the self-declared homeless man.

"That's not how it works," answered the canvasser.

The homeless man proceeded to ask him exactly how it worked, how a homeless man was to get this "help." But I don't know what he was answered.

I had watched the man pocket cash from all sorts of people, the way a beggar would with a paper cup - but in this case, it had to go through envelopes and bank accounts and many other hands. And he couldn't lose it to an unapproved homeless man. Especially not in its rawest, most delicate form.

Pristine Privacy

A friend from school was on the opposite train platform from me today. She wore a newsboy cap down over her eyes and held her head low as she waited. I willed her to look over and greet me from across the tracks, but instead she hid under her gray bill, and I could hardly confirm that it was her. When the train came, I converged our paths by walking to the next car. I planned to tell her how I'd tried to catch her eye for ten minutes. But she looked so completely anonymous and solitary; she was content in her own thoughts. So I left her alone on the crowded train.