Curriculum Vitae, part 1 One summer I worked as a temp, and I got hired to stand sentinel in a chichi shop, greeting customers all day while my back ached. The store was expensive and specialized, the decor was white and metal, and so few people came in that it looked and felt like a museum. The boredom I experienced in that job was almost spiritual; I felt like if I stood there quietly enough for long enough I'd figure out the answers to life's hardest questions. That didn't happen, but the storefront was made of two huge plate-glass windows. One bright morning a moving truck with Missouri plates brought men in cowboy hats and big belt buckles who moved an office across the narrow street. After shoving metal desks and filing cabinets into the back they sat down on the bed of their truck and ate big sandwiches, their boots dangling above the blacktop. Another day, on a rare occasion that I was alone in the store, a man in worn, dirty clothes sort of shimmied through the door and came up to me. His face had the empty, happy, glittery expression of the completely mad. He took my hand as if to shake it and kissed it instead. Neither of us said a word, and then he danced back to the door and out onto the sidewalk. During my last week at the store, about an hour after we closed, a car jumped the sidewalk directly across the street and plowed down the sidewalk, uprooting three small trees and a parking sign before it hit a woman walking her bike. I learned about it on the news. I'd just gotten home from work and I was standing in my bedroom, eating dinner off a plate in my hand and watching my little TV, and for one surreal second the view on the screen was exactly the one I'd had for weeks through the store's plate-glass windows. I had one of those moments where you think without really thinking, Am I going crazy? The woman died, and the next day I stood and watched as people came to leave flowers where she was hit. All day long people came until there was a mound of flowers like a shrine. Here’s another one.