When you wake up and say, "What a perfect day for a street fair," around 3 in the afternoon, it's too hot.

That happened at the 2005 Haight Street fair. There was a certain crankiness underlying the packed crowd around three. I noticed that a father with a 4 year old had miraculously found a place to sit, a stray milk crate, at the edge of the crowd.

He got out a tie dye, presumably newly purchased, that was a piece of silk big the size to be a table cloth for a card table. It was blue and white. Blue mostly, with jagged exanding white looking like a couple of galaxies being born.

He put the silk over him and his child. So there she was, not with the crowd, but with blue and white smoothness. They stayed there for a while, and when they came out, she stroked the silke and looked at the blue and white pattern. The crowd had its crankiness, and she and her father had their own big, small calm world. The feel of the crowd didn't have a chance against the feel of the silk.