Yesterday was the last day. I expected any number of last-minuters, but there was really no way to prepare for the desperation, the hope, the faith that people are so willing to give me. The woman with the completely blank application and four foster children, the woman with four children and a husband doing a long stretch for possession, the woman with the disabled child and birth records wiped out in Katrina. And questions, hundreds of questions, piling up and swirling all over each other and I am spinning all over the room trying to give the right answer in the best way. There is a moment, as there always is, where I am so overwhelmed with gratitude, with the grace of others, that I cry.

So, here is the money shot: I have already marveled at the birth certificate. Here is Thailand, it is 1938, and the paper is rich and textured, the writing careful and beautiful. It is a time and a place where a birth is still honorable and notable. The certificate is untouched by its 70-year journey into my hands and we handle it so gently as we make the necessary copies. At the end of the process I shake their hands to thank them in a way that the translator by my side does not need to help me with. I shake the grandfathers hand, I shake the sons hand, I shake his wife's hand. When I reach out to the grandmother, she leans towards me. She is holding her infant grandchild in one arm, extending the other to me. As I grasp her hand, I am looking into the babys face, his enormous round eyes, a thick river of clear drool, the open mouth with two tiny teeth. And really, here is everything. I am looking at the reason for everything, right in its tiny wondering face. I don't think I got ten paces away before I felt my own face slip.

Long after we have gotten up each day, I make the bed. After showers, the brushing of teeth, dressing, the eating of breakfast, I go upstairs, pull the sheets up, fold them back, ready them. When I slide my hands under the pillows to straighten them, they are still warm.

I keep running an image through my head. I went out to get a cheap burrito at lunchtime. At the edge of the Tenderloin, there are a lot of places to get cheap food, but I am only crossing the street. Waiting for the light, I can hear him before I see him, mostly lying on the sidewalk, partially leaning against the wall of the diner. He is howling a broken toothed duet with a passing streeter--Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze. By the time I step out of the taqueria with my lunch he has fallen silent. A bundle of worn grimy clothes, one arm thrown up over his face. At the end of that arm is his hand, thick and red from the chill with spalling chelated nails, waving ever so slightly, like a lobster's claw at the bottom of a restaurant tank.

The burrito was good. Only one piece of gristle so tough I had to spit it out.

I'm not sure how I got here. I mean, I do know exactly how, I was fully awake for all of it. And what I am doing is the most valuable thing I can do in this life. But it keeps bumping around in my head that I have made the transition from someone who makes art to someone who consumes it. It's not like I get to consume it very often, even, and when I do, it is not as enjoyed as when I make it myself.

I live in a place where human interaction doesn't really happen. Peoples cars interact with each other, peoples shiny happy interacts with each other. I work in a place where people think they are good because they do good. It's the laziest kind of self-satisfaction I have ever seen. I haven't met a real person yet, one that if I flipped them over wouldn't reveal their cardboard backing.

In my garden in Brooklyn the new vines have grown over up over the barbed wire. There is a new bakery opening up around the corner. I wonder what it will smell like in the room I used to sleep in, the room with red walls.