Three o’clock on a beautiful bright May afternoon in Davis Square. I walked out of McIntyre and Moore Used Books, blinking at the sun. Two cops were standing just outside the door, looking down the street.<\/p>\n
“… why I don’t like him,” said one cop to her partner.<\/p>\n
“He’s a troublemaker,” the other cop replied.<\/p>\n
“Well, let’s try not to antagonize him.”<\/p>\n
They were slowly moving up the street on the edge of the sidewalk. Without thinking about it, I moved over to the other side of the sidewalk, next to the buildings.<\/p>\n
Twenty feet further along, a man was just sitting on the edge of the curb. Corduroy sport coat, much the worse for wear; slicked back messy hair; filthy bike messenger bag over his shoulder. He had to concentrate hard in order to sit down — drunk, or strung out on something.<\/p>\n
A third cop was talking to the man saying, “No, you got in trouble because…”<\/p>\n
I didn’t wait to hear what the cop was going to say. When you pass three cops lined up waiting to deal with one guy, it’s always best to keep walking. I threaded my way through the hipsters and students who populate Davis Square during the day, walking along under the bright sunshine of a May afternoon.<\/p>\n
No Internet access yesterday, so I’m posting this a day after the fact.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three o’clock on a beautiful bright May afternoon in Davis Square. I walked out of McIntyre and Moore Used Books, blinking at the sun. Two cops were standing just outside the door, looking down the street. “… why I don’t like him,” said one cop to her partner. “He’s a troublemaker,” the other cop replied. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-cambridge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}