The Wrong Gift

There's a man who lives under a portico, in front of what used to be the local Chinese restaurant. Most of the block is empty, the local Giant supermarket owns the building, and after terminating the leases of all the previous tenants, is having a dispute with the neighborhood about how the building is to be used. In the meantime, this man has made this portion of pavement and storefront his home.

He's changeable, like the weather. Sometimes he has long, angry, pacing conversations with people only he can see. Other times, he sits listening to Motown on his boombox and smiling calmly. Some days he calls out to each passerby for "spare change." And sometimes he retreats behind the screen of blankets and grocery cart full of plastic bags. It's also possible that he's the man who exposed himself to me from the window of a building under construction a few years back.

On my way to the pharmacy in search of nostrums for my relentless cold, I passed this street neighbor. Under the roof overhang, he had built a little mound of decorations, tinsel, green and red fabric, boxes. Not quite a shrine, nothing specific, but definitely a seasonal expression. Whatever his illness, however distorted and troubled his worldview, the desire to make something beautiful and special for this time of year is still alive in him.

My first impulse was to go over and just hand him the $20 bill I had in my pocket. But, and this is a long story for another time, I have a personal rule about not just giving people money. So I made my way to the drugstore trying to figure out what I could do.

After stocking up on tissues and zinc lozenges, I went across the street to the supermarket. I went to the bakery department and bought one of those mini Table Talk pies (I thought I was getting an apple pie, but realized right after I paid for it that it was lemon).

"Excuse me, I said as I approached him. He startled slightly, and looked up at me. At close range, his face was much older than I expected. His eyes were very tired. He was afraid, but he looked fragile. There was no sign of the rage which I've found so intimidating.

"Would you like this?" I asked, "It's a pie."

"No thank you, he said.

"Are you sure? It's just a pie."

"No, thank you. Do you have any spare change?"

"No, I said.

"Thanks for asking, though, he said. I put the little pie back in my bag and went home.

I didn't give him what he asked for, I tried to give him something I thought he should want. The interaction didn't go the way I wanted it to. God knows what he made of it.

Maybe I should simply have told him that I liked his decoration.

And now, of course, coward that I am, I'm wondering how I'm going to walk past him without making eye contact every other day of the year.

Say it ain't so!

According to The Register:

Microsoft Corp is believed to have trained its acquisition crosshairs on Macromedia Inc, lining up a deal that would throw enterprise Java into a spin...

Flash would give Microsoft access to tools for building rich interfaces on both desktops and mobile devices, furthering .NET.

An acquisition, though, would be seen as a hostile move deliberately designed to thwart J2EE uptake. Flash is a powerful and rich development environment, which - through Macromedia's changes this year - took a step closer to J2EE.

This would be double-plus ungood for those of us who use Macromedia products on Macs. Macromedia, which back in the day was a Mac-only company, now develops first and best for the Windows platform. If it were acquired by Microsoft, I can only imagine the trend getting worse. Even an Apple/Adobe merger or acquisition would constitute only a modest balancing of the scales.

I wish Apple would get serious about the authoring side of the software business again. HyperCard, Apple Media Tool (yes, I used it!)... those were the days. We need to be able to author multi-media for the web as easily as we can make home movies with iMovie. But I'm sure not holding my breath waiting for it to happen.

Happy Blogaversary...

...to Dave, whose Time's Shadow turned three the other day.