You dropped your grocery list: the DC edition!Some treasures from the day after Christmas, found wal

You dropped your grocery list: the DC edition!Some treasures from the day after Christmas, found walking around with T and W and Oliver in his Lanier Heights neighborhood. It was warm for December and not so much raining as distilling outside. We had just eaten burritos in this little place, sitting on stools in the corner while five feet away from us, two detectives interviewed the owner, who was recounting a cake robbery in magnificent detail. The one detective took notes by hand, the other took photos; they both asked questions. Are you getting all of this down? I’m writing as fast as I can. Now where were you standing? At what point did you suspect something was up? There were four women—“orange coat woman,” “black coat woman,” “gray sweatshirt,” and “the fourth one,” who basically just sat there on a stool, not doing anything. At one point, orange coat was by the lollipops and black coat went out front, held the door open and asked someone on the sidewalk if the food was tasty. Yes, they told her. They got away with the cake and the tip jar. I heard chocolate, Oliver heard tres leches. Maybe they got both. Eavesdropping has kind of a bad rap, but it is one of my greatest pleasures, and not one that I feel guilty about. I mean, if we were going to avoid hearing the detective story, we would have had to leave—sometimes you can’t help but overhear things. It’s all related, really, the eavesdropping, the lists. These brief flashes into other people’s worlds, not the whole world, just a fragment, an image. You fill in the rest of the story, all the possible stories. There’s a purity to finding scraps of paper and overhearing scraps of conversation that were never meant for you, not curated or edited for an outside audience. There’s a purity even when it’s actually dirty, as Oliver reminded me when I tried to hand him a piece of paper I just peeled off the wet sidewalk and he said, “do you mind if I don’t touch that?” -- source link

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