Seattle, City of Cranes, 2 April 2018.
“Excuse me, Sir,” the man called out. “I’m starving. Can you help me please?”
Frank was out in the streets again struggling to move his broken body this way and that way as he pivot-twisted and zigzagged from curb to curb only to give up from exhaustion and wander right down the middle of the road, getting run over by humans in cars and trucks be damned and indeed goddamned. Spring 2018 in Seattle, Washington. Giant construction cranes hovered overhead like those gigantic Martian battle tripods in the 2005 War of the Worlds movie. The Emerald City, once the Jet City, has now become the City of Cranes, a muddy, noisy, chaotic mess of hope, despair, greed, beauty, boondoggles, and opportunity.
I shared this with Rockcatcher, one of my managers as I came into work thru the employee entrance. He earned the nickname for catching a large, softball-size rock bouncing down the mountain directly into his face when he and a few others were climbing over in the Olympics. Snagged the rock with both hands without toppling backwards down the cliff, too. Both of us, however, had encountered Frank plunging into traffic to declare his hunger.