A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to San Diego for a long weekend. Though she had been back several times for work, it had been years since we had gone there on vacation, always with one or both of our boys. We worried that our experiences might seem empty without them tugging at our hands, pulling us in different directions, demanding more of this and that, crying when they got tired, giggling uncontrollably at the unexpected.

We had heard rumors that San Diego, like the Bay Area, had become choked with so many people and so much traffic that it would be hard to drive our rental car even on weekends. Of course, that was exactly the reason we decided to fly down early Saturday morning rather than Friday night. To brave Friday-night traffic in our area, especially heading south to the airports, is to be a traffic lemming willingly jumping off the gridlock cliff.

While San Diego is a big city—1.1 million in the city with more than 2.5 million in the greater metropolitan area—the airport is in town, next to the harbor, only about a mile from the US Grant hotel, where we stayed, at the edge of the Gaslight District. We picked up our rental car and took Harbor Way to Broadway, past the three-masted bark, Star of India, past the trolley and railroad stations. There was no traffic, and not counting a few bad turns, the trip took fewer than ten minutes.

We wandered the city on Saturday afternoon and went to Old Town for dinner. The area was packed, and parking was only available at the fringes of the district. Finding all restaurants booked hours in advance, we spent less than $12 for reasonable food at a taqueria where we sat on an outdoor terrace, watching people pass on a balmy evening.

On Sunday we went to beautiful Balboa park, home of the Zoo and Globe Theater. There was a matinee performance of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost which my wife wanted to see. I argued that the day was too nice, that we should go to Marine World and watch killer whales jump and splash, soaking those sitting in the front rows, and sit with penguins in their subantarctic habitat, and watch dolphins leap high above ropes and flags.

My wife relented, and we spent much of our time at Marine World, when we weren’t watching animal shows, watching children who were our boys’ ages when we last visited. We reminisced about what we did and how they had reacted, and remembered, in particular, how they had demanded to eat or play as soon as a show had ended. (Children, especially boys, rarely spend time in quiet contemplation, because their brief history is filled with remembrances of the fun they had when something—anything—was happening: When nothing looms, petulance follows.)

Sunday evening we were eating outside on the patio of an Indian restaurant, also named the Star of India. There was a gentle breeze and passersby seemed happy, when a person wearing a worn, hot, hooded coat, pushing a shopping cart, stopped in front of the restaurant and began to tie down falling things with a frayed green nylon rope: a portable cat box; a water container with wheels; blankets; ill-defined, dirty objects jammed one within the other. The person faced the street, demanding nothing from us, concentrating on the task of reestablishing control on top of the cart. A waitress from the restaurant went out to help the person, but she couldn’t.

When the waitress passed our table, my wife asked if he was going to be all right. The waitress said that she thought so. I said, "She," correcting my wife, for I had seen the face of the Asian woman, perhaps my age, wearing glasses, her face tight with concentration as she struggled with the deteriorating nylon rope.

"We should do something," my wife said.

"What can we do?" I said, losing interest in my food.

The woman moved on slowly, stopping every few steps, trying to regain control of her mobile world. My wife and I talked of something—I don’t remember what—as we watched the woman struggle.