I attempt to modify a small icon of a bean seed. There are about six miniature panels of pictures of the bean. I want to edit two of the frames, and also add a drawing for the back of the portrait.

The artwork is to go up somewhere, perhaps online, perhaps, who knows? as a display in a train terminal. I must work from an enclycopedia article on the bean, because it no longer exists on earth. The presentation is an elegaic psalm to a strain of life now lost. There is no editorial sidebar to the image collection.

"They didn't even hug the kids this morning," says Niki J. It is the time of the confrontation. Each dawn we gather on our side of the line. The sides are selected by age. No one knows the exact demarcation, but youth however defined is over there.

One of them says, the line held this day. It is the crepuscular standown hour. I ask, what if way down that way one or another breached the line? It runs directly down the center of an otherwise unremarkable street. And this one, a stolid non-confrontational studious sort, replies, oh, then one or the other side would be overrun. He says, the line held today.

I am called to see about something. Someone requires an assay. She is making her way down this street. Pushing along a table tilted to run on wheels. I go ahead of her. I can do this something.

At the end of a street which meets this street, there are wonderful sinewy oaks languishing, with branches thick and twining and beginning low on the trunks. There are veins of gold running along the branches, motherlodes of them. They run just off the ground and then swoop up like the flights of birds. The bark is so white and the gold is brilliant in the afternoon sunlight of another day, another confrontation ending back on the street where this one perpendicts.

I have to go for something. I am thinking, if she arrives, perhaps she may do damage to the wonderful oaks. I must go for a tool and then I can do something, but I hope I'm back before she is here, moseying with her table tilted on wheels.

I come across Scoobie! Hey, here's Scoobie! I bend to him, love him. He's on the second floor of a walkway near a door. The restroom. I open it, and he bounds inside. He picks up something from the floor of a stall, and I worry, but it's only a stick, carved, a toy. Someone is lying in the floor of the room beyond the entrance. It's all right, I think. It's all right anyone behaves peculiar here.

It's all right, but if there were a soundtrack, it would be one of those mournful, slightly portentous, cello solos.


[And today, the morning after, we went to the beach as we do on Saturday mornings, Niki J and Scoob and I, and after we walk along West Cliff around the bike path, and we look back at the beach, and just beyond the barricades before us is unaccountably some guy just lying there on the rock escarpment some twenty feet above the surf.]