Sometimes the art is in the detail.

The sun is shining through the window onto my back and into my hair. I'm in another phase of giving up coffee, so I have a latte in my hand. The Picasso exhibition I've been to this morning is still moving in my brain. I want to know more about his life, definitely more about his lovers but it appears that Picasso lived his life in four parts that retail for thirty dollars each.

And that's the trick of the museum shop, isn't it? Capture people when they have been broken open by the creativity of others and convince them they can possess some of the greatness. But why must the greatness be inevitably stamped onto magnets? Or impractically small notepads? 

In the same cafe, the young woman across from me is eating her cookie as if she were a gopher - all hunched shoulders, two hands holding her food, big teeth bared, taking tiny nibbles until she has nibbled the unfortunate cookie ragged.

She has dark hair, pulled back from her face, blunt fringe up front. She is self-conscious of her acne; her mother seems conscious of her in her entirety. 

The two of them don't talk. As the young woman gets up and walks away she could be mistaken for a woman much older; she is bowed by age though she must be less than twenty.

An elderly couple sits close by too. Their rings are thin slivers of gold; the edges of the rings were soaked up by surrounding skin over the many years of marriage. 

A proud grandmother struts past pushing her new granddaughter in a pram. Her daughter, the mother of the baby, half walks, half skips to keep up. Her mother is racing away with the baby; her mother is so happy to be a grandmother at last that she doesn't really care.

I can't sit here any longer. The latte is finished; the little cookie has been eaten. I'm off to happily wander in Golden Gate Park.