Talkers

“Let’s cross to the other side,” I say to Katie as we’re walking down the street. “There’s some ‘talkers' at the corner.”

And so we cross in the middle of the block, to the shady side of the street, to avoid the two kids in matching green outfits standing at the corner with clipboards, waiting to accost strangers in a shameless attempt to guilt the various monied walkers of Park Slope into donating to some relatively wary cause or other.

While we stand at the corner in a crowd waiting to cross the intersection to continue on our way unmolested, I wonder to myself what a traffic analyst would make of these two kids changing the pedestrian flow for blocks in either direction, as people like us crossed the streets to avoid talking to them.