Stress Relief

While Roscoe was going through the stenting procedure yesterday, Alisha and I looked for something close by where we could take our minds off of the stress. As luck would have it, the San Francisco Botanical Garden was nearby and had free admission every second Tuesday (the day of the procedure). Alisha and I walked down there from the hospital and spent a few hours strolling around, admiring the complexity and variety of all of these plants and flowers that God has created. Alisha took quite a few pictures of what we saw and here are some of them:

Artichoke

 

Looks like an egg

HUGE leaves, felt like reptile skin

Our wonderful journey ended on a sour note. As we were wrapping up our trip through the park, we passed a man in his 30's talking loudly on a cell phone. He finished the call using the word "idiot" and then told me "Don't look at me". I thought he was kidding, so I smirked, and that set him off. He aggressively walked toward me and confrontationally asked why I laughed, without letting me respond. He asked "Have you ever seen a weapon?", to which I responded "No". Then he questioned whether I had ever seen a gun before. I tried to keep walking but now he was following us and walking beside me, still speaking aggressively with a full dose of profanity. He continued to ask questions like "Where do you hail from?", to which I responded "Sacramento" and then he clarified that he was asking about ethnic origin. Finally I said I was part Polish, and he responded by saying that he was part German and that my confrontation with him should teach me not to mess (but he didn't say "mess") with Germans. He seemed to have sufficiently asserted his dominance, so he let us walk away. We got out of the park and then called the park security, who contacted the police.

My presumption was that the man was a low-level drug dealer, based upon my extensive research into drug trafficking (ie: I saw "Breaking Bad"). The man was very skinny, the kind of non-healthy skinny that would typically come from meth use (but I think his teeth were fine). He also had the "crazy eyes" where he didn't blink often. The man was also wearing a brown and yellow velour tracksuit. If this man wasn't a drug dealer, I question why a single man in his 30's would be walking through a botanical garden near closing time with no camera and seemingly uninterested in the scenery. I closed the day wondering why God would let such a man live, while Roscoe struggles to continue breathing.