Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with a striking way to picture inequality. Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.

The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall.

Note the difference between median and mean incomes.

I wonder at the failures of progressives to communicate the value of strong government programs in terms of consumption smoothing and class mobility–I mean things like good education, affordable healthcare, consumer protection, etc. Considering our regressive tax code (wealthy Americans are often more likely to pay the capital gains rate of 15% than the income tax rates for higher income brackets), you would think that a progressive message would be welcome during a recession.

I don’t spend much time in Chinatown. Nothing is the same. Many of the restaurateurs are from Hong Kong or Vietnam and little Mandarin is heard in the streets. But today I have a mission.

I have yet to find a restaurant that serves even a passable version of 干煸刀豆, but I don’t really need anything edible today. Only an effigy, a totem to a lingering memory and a lost friend.

Once upon a time in China, there was a big man with big meathooks for hands and a big square jaw that could eat as much as two Chinese men half his size. Which he did. Often. This man loved green beans and would eat two full plates in a sitting, with a large, often warm beer. His hands dwarfed restaurant chopsticks into little more than glorified toothpicks, and the fumbling manner with which food transferred from plate to mouth belied the sheer volume of consumption. He was, above most things, an eater.

It was in eating that I often found myself in his company, all over the world, and in eating how I passed my last night with him. In each of my memories of this albatross of a man–a good meal, a pre-meal snack, a road-side bite… Whenever possible, green beans adorned the tables we shared, in oil and garlic and unidentifiable numbers of mouth-numbing peppers. As soon as they arrived they were ushered out, into our mouths (more his than mine) and the annals of our time together, another plate in the history of all of us.

In Boston such beans are scarce, so I track down the closest thing I can lay hands on and wait for the predictably flimsy styrofoam container to arrive so I can set out on the T. Five stops on the red line from Downtown Crossing to Harvard, each station’s departure marked by a visible increase in the leaking juices from those soggy beans into the semi-transparent plastic bag I carry in my right hand.

From the Harvard T it’s a short walk to the water and the boathouse. Its 2:30pm on a Wednesday and the boathouse is closed. So much the better, I don’t really want to talk to anyone today.

It’s a crazy thing, saying goodbye. Mostly it’s for me, why I am here with my shoes off, knee deep in the Charles River. I know it doesn’t really matter to him any more. But I would like some closure and I need some sort of ritual to get it, a symbol to mark this passing in my head–otherwise, reunion will always be just another meal away. Here on the Charles, where I know he spent the mornings before I knew him, I say goodbye in the way that made the most sense between us–a plate of green beans into the river of our past.

Now my pant legs are soaking and I am alone on the shore, sitting on a park bench watching the Cape Cod masses stroll by in the afternoon of their lives. I think I will sit here a little longer, thinking about how quickly the Charles ate those beans and marveling at a man who ate as fast as the river.

Her tangled, curly mass of hair remains oddly stable to spite the potholes. She is unshaken by the attention. She an artist and musician, he a filmmaker and fashionista—a seat’s separation filters between them love’s first overture. Borne of a struggle against the final two permutations of a rubix cube, the mathematician’s daughter now leans to the aspiring director’s seat to explain her ambitions—Making It Big and Staying In Touch with Her Roots. He speaks softly. She leans in to “what?!” This is romance.

His mouth moves again now as he jots a few offhand notes on sheets of unruled, white paper bound with a paper clip. Vocal chords apparently fail him. Every sentence elicits a demand to repeat from the back-seat love of his life—her body language a study in practiced indifference, all perpendicular to his attempts to steer a parallel course along the Feng Wah Express. She is playing hard to get, he must be thinking, even as she thinks of making herself less available.

But reality never checks love’s ambitions. The sheer force of his feelings blind him to the complex permutations of her polite refusal, rob him of all voice… and now she is leaning painfully, perpendicularly in to grasp at his words with head shakes and quick nods. His shoulders roll forward now, closing distance to the seat-gap and now he shakes in the silent, earnest throes of love. Rapt in the silent, maddening movement of his lips she fidgets with unease.

The BQE bumps beneath them in a chorus of winter potholes as the French-speaking Vietnamese family surrounding them both erupts in argument. Manhattan is now in full view and tension between the seats rises in frustrated silence. Without wild gesticulation he attempts to silently convey his deep love and interest in her Goals and Ambitions, her Music and Art and Activism and how well she listens to him.

Her hair is a study in the science of Aqua Net, its rigidity belying the tension in his voiceless overture. She fumbles in her bag for her book or an excuse. He leans closer now, his nose penetrating the seat gap in thinly-veiled metaphor. As the suspense builds to its terrible, inevitable climax, the Fung Wah barrels off the Manhattan Bridge past Canal Street to its final destination. The Franco-Vietnamese family explodes into the aisles, trapping the Aspiring Director and Musician in a crossfire of love’s language. He swells in quiet confidence as she shrinks in a flurry of bag packing.

And now they are up and she is off. Pen in hand, he extends a polite offer to take her phone number, which she politely can’t refuse. And they are politely, awkwardly walking the aisle in silence, to which they are now well-accustomed, into the city and their lives beyond the bus.