The Streetcorner Stargazer

You went in for a bottle of water and came out twenty-three minutes later with a bag of sunflower seeds the clerk pressed into your hand. You'd crossed paths four times before; tonight you stayed at the register and asked after her son, the one in Zhengzhou, and she told you he's getting married and the bride-price is still being worked out. This happens to you three to five times a week. Not for a network, not for charity. You are simply, actually interested in the person in front of you, in this one moment of them. You read the world not as "where am I headed in five years" but as "what's inside this person, right now." A first-quarter moon never elbows toward the top of the sky; it stays at rooftop height over the alley, exactly the height to watch all night. Altair is the cowherd's star, the warmth of an ordinary life. Tomorrow there'll be another stranger at another register. There always is.