A casual walk to the grocery store on a Friday evening in my neighborhood -- mind you, it's literally on the block next to me: a grill and chick-fil-a cooler in the window display of the theater they're renovating next door, a woman on her stoop who I'm pretty sure is a participant in the alcohol/STD study I work for, a man asking for money who had to rephrase his sentence at least three times before he could clearly muster even one intelligible word, a man nomming down on some fried chicken in the corner in the entrance of the grocery store, an endless shuffle of supermarket-line confusion, a proclamation of the superiority of ice cream to toilet paper, an inexplicit, simultaneous crash of all of the self checkout computers save one, a manager lecturing an employee about how to properly clean up a plastic bag off the ground, a woman vivaciously dressed as a high-heeled cat, a drunk in a taxi enthusiastically exclaiming this sight to his driver, and so many others. I did get a, "You enjoy your evening, beautiful" towards the end there (followed by a different man across the sidewalk asking, "Huh?"), so in case there was any question to begin with, a thorough slew of definite winning moments. Here all I wanted was a pint of ice cream to close out my week, and yet, in the space of maybe ten minutes and not even a full city block, I got so, so much Balti-more. And yet no one understands what it is about this town that is just so charming; I may hate city life, but sometimes this place is simply priceless.
