Walking along Salt Lake’s Main Street here in the heart of downtown, you pass a planter box about every twenty or thirty feet. These things are huge, roughly the size of the bed on a half-ton pickup truck; they each contain a mature tree and usually a nice arrangement of petunias or some other colorful but relatively low-maintenance flower. They’re also capped around their perimeters with a marble ledge about a foot wide, and those ledges are at just about the perfect height for the average-height person to rest their hindquarters. So, let’s review: you’ve got a nice, comfortable, flat surface under a shady tree in the middle of an urban area. What does that get you? That’s right, a perfect invitation for those members of society who are, shall we say, less obligated to be anyplace during the day to park their behinds and watch the world go by. My lunchtime constitutional is not complete unless I get hit up for pocket change at least three times between my office and the next block up. On the days when I’m feeling generous, I pass out whatever coins and small bills I may have; other days, it annoys the hell out of me to be seeing the same old grubby hands attached to the same old pleading faces. And then there are other days…

Picture one of those planters I just told you about. A man lies on his back on the ledge, one arm sprawled over his face. His shoes are off, lying in a heap a foot or so away. He may be sleeping, or passed out. He may be dead. It’s hard to tell. A city employee in a bright orange safety vest stands over him. The worker looks baffled, as if he’s not sure how to handle the situation. I assume he’s trying to figure out how to awaken the bum without getting mowed down by a reflex defensive move. He raises his EZ Reacher, apparently taking no chances on getting too close to the vagrant.

The worker slides his grabber-claw in close to the vagrant’s rib cage, presumably to give him a good poke and see if he’ll respond. At least that’s how it appears at first. But instead of bothering the man, the worker gently pulls the trigger-grip to close the pincer. What the hell is he doing, I wonder, pinching the guy? No, he’s not pinching… he is gingerly withdrawing the Reacher from under the vagrant with a prize clenched in the suction-cupped digits. It’s a cigarette butt, which our homeless guy was apparently laying on, or near. Probably he was the one who smoked it and snubbed it out on the marble ledge.

The city worker drops the butt into his collection sack and walks away, apparently satisifed. The vagrant doesn’t move, gives no sign of knowing that anyone has been anywhere near him. Sleeping, passed out, dead… only feet away, the traffic continues to move. And I keep walking.