On the way home from an appointment with my doctor today, I angled through Madison Park and decided to count the water towers I could see as I barreled along. Water towers, for those who don't know, are the cylindrical containers that squat on thin poles atop many Manhattan high-rises. For some reason I find them quite beautiful -- covered, as they almost uniformly are, with aged and graying clapboard and crowned by pointed teapot-like lids. I counted eleven.

I was pleased with myself for thinking to do this, because it indicated that there are times during my daily walks when I think to look up. You see, I worry about looking down too much. I'm aware of how routinely I look down for an odd reason: I keep finding money. This in itself isn't the worst thing a fellow can do to pass time in the City. On the other hand, it isn't the most lucrative either. Mostly what I find are pennies, occasionally a nickel or a dime, even less occasionally a quarter. Once, but only once, I found forty dollars; another time a twenty-dollar bill.

What my finds tell me is that New Yorkers are careless about pennies. I know a few people who, when given pennies as change, throw them away. Even panhandlers scorn them. (For those arguing that pennies ought to be done away with because they're more trouble than they're literally worth, my discoveries could be a clinching argument.) In addition, my finds sometimes trouble me, because they start me wondering if all the looking down I do is symbolic of my general attitude towards life. I like to think of myself as an look-up kind of guy, but the pennies I find and find and find suggest otherwise. The other night I was walking up Second Avenue with a couple of friends, and in the dozen or so blocks we covered, I spotted five abandoned pennies. As I slipped them in my pocket after reporting whether I'd found them heads or tails up, my chums kept going, "Wow! Another one," but I wondered whether they were thinking, "Why is he always looking down?"

I'm going on about this now, because this is the week that the World Economic Forum is taking place in the eastern part of midtown Manhattan. The organizers, as papers world-wide have reported, decided they'd come to New York City as a gesture of solidarity after the September tragedy. Which sounds very nice on the face of it but is costing the city an estimated eleven million dollars in police-force overtime alone. None of the moguls are paying something like twenty-five thousand dollars to participate, seem to have thought of the expense bill they were logging for the municipal government...

When events like the one the City is hosting at the charged moment take place elsewhere, I always imagine them as commandeering the entire area. But of course they don't. This one is like all of those. It's pretty much confined to one part of town. The visiting protesters, although they have fanned out to other sections for part of their stay here, have also been more or less contained. And as I weigh the pros and cons of the WEF, I see arguments on both sides. Although the fancy Forum dinners sound vulgarly extravagant with Elton John apparently paid a million bucks for entertaining at one soirée, it does appear as if at least some of the networking participants could leave motivated to do something beneficial rather than simply remain committed to an elitist global fraternity.

I understand what the protesters have on their minds, too. In these days of Enron headlines, the reality of corporate infringements doesn't have to be explained. Rattling their gilded cages doesn't seem like an altogether wrong notion. Also and as a sidelight, the way in which the activists express their disapproval has put a new phrase in my lexicon. It's "snake march", which this morning's New York Times defined thusly: "A line of people [who] weave haphazardly along sidewalks and streets."

But these impressions of mine don't at all grow out of my being a first-hand witness. For all I'm actually seeing of the Forum, I might as well be in another city in this, or any, country. The only thing changed in my neck of the urban woods is the cop on the beat. He's proliferated, and so has she. Policepersons monitor every corner, sometimes alone and sometimes in chatting pairs. Otherwise, while the manipulation of the globe's billions, trillions and quadrillions is being mooted in glittering halls and while that manipulation is being mocked on adjacent avenues, what am I doing? I'm walking around town, quietly picking up pennies. There's a discrepancy here, but damned if I can figure out what it signifies.

Also by David Finkle:
COFFEE-HOUSE BLUES
THE ZEN OF JAY-WALKING
CHANGING PLACES
DARKNESS AT NOON
UNION SQUARE
MAKING IT REAL
WAKE UP CHILLUN
FLYING THE FLAG
PLEASANTVILLE
AN ILL WIND
THE ABSOLUTE PLACE TO BE