I return to Telegraph, 6:30 pm; my friend Helen greets me, her workday done. We drive to the Whole Foods Market, six blocks away. We expect it to be closed and instead found it booming. Full, everybody in good spirits, happy to give a donation to the ghost of health-food’s past, and the yuppie-market’s future.

A man and a woman are stalking the sidewalk bordering the parking lot, “Excuse me, my wife and I are trying to get some food and money…”

I don’t carry any cash, and say so, but once I’ve eaten some olives and grape leaves, I remember myself, and buy a gift card for the pair. Fifteen dollars, not enough to turn life around, but enough for soup and bread for two, even at stinking, lovely, capitalist Whole Foods.

I ask the good-looking girl at the register, “You’re working tonight, huh?” She jokes with me, “What’s tonight? Sunday? Remember when it was…?”

“Something eve?” I ask. “What was that called? Hey, this is the capitalist holiday – stay open till midnight, that’s the celebration.”

We’re both a little punch drunk and tired from who knows what, and everything in between, and I sit back down and let the camera steal a moment or two.

I go back out and see the man, but not his wife. We find her in the parking lot, asking a woman getting into her car for a donation. I approach, and remind her that I’d spoken with her on the way in. I give her the card, and go back in.

I sit and eat with my friend for ten minutes, and on the way out, we stop and talk with the man and woman.

He’s about six feet, black, with a good build and frame and a clean-shaven scalp. He’s anywhere from 35 to 45. She’s worse for wear, some of her teeth haven’t been so kind as to stick around, and she looks like she’s seen seasons of hurricane and more. She’s lost her house, she tells me. She’s from Oakland. Her name is Sheila, and she lets me have a picture with her.

“Has anyone given you anything?” I asked.

“Hardly anything, hardly anything,” she shakes her head and neck.

The man says otherwise, “People give food, food; they give up here; they’re – what do you call it – liberal? Liberal, not like in Oakland,” he says, pointing behind us. “Not like in Oakland, they’re…up here, they give more. They’re more generous.”

His oldest daughter is in Tennessee. It’s different there too, he tells us, and he might go there for awhile.

We wish him well and get in the van carrying the gear from the art show, and drive out of the floating island of make-believe called Berzerkeley.

The road is full, and we race the train streaming between the highways.

Home, I put the pictures on the computer. These computers, these amazing, time-eating, communicating, deceiving computers.

I asked the man if he had email so I could send him the pictures. “I don’t even know,” he said, “I don’t even know how to use….that’s – everything is on the computer,” he explained, his hands and arms curving down and in, pushing the world into an invisible electronic box.

“I’m going to take a class,” he said, ”to learn to use them.”

At home, on the television, George Bailey tells his Mary, as he does every Christmas, “ I don’t want any plastics and I don’t want any ground floors! And I don’t want to marry anyone, ever!”

“And I don’t want,,, Oh, Mary, Mary!” He falters.

“Oh, George, George,” says Donna Reed, crying, her arms around her beloved, her face pressed into his.

Frank Capra’s dream, the immigrant’s dream, to come to America and find that small success, big enough to keep the demons of hunger and desperate living far at bay, and small enough to have that unheard of luxury, that while doing it, you get to keep your heart and soul in the bargain, for a change…