This is a story about how ordinary people in their everyday lives, with little fuss or bother, deal with homeless persons. It takes place at a Third Avenue Starbucks in New York City’s Kips Bay neighborhood.

It’s an extraordinary story because it is so ordinary.

Like most Starbucks today, the one in Kips Bay, a typically diverse Manhattan neighborhood, is all tables or counters along the windows.

Except for one corner with two old-school, semi-easy chairs that most Starbucks don’t have anymore.

Anyone may sit there of course. I generally do. But the people sitting in those chairs tend to be different — usually alone, no tablets, not doing business. All men, different ages, often black.

The Men in the Corner. They look kind of out of place. Maybe homeless, maybe not. Not obvious. But “different.”

The customers pay no attention to them. Same is true with the baristas. Unless one of those men falls asleep.

If you are sleeping, a barista will come over, gently and discretely try to wake you and say that you have to leave. Then the employee walks away to cut the sleeper some time to get his act together and go.

Most men in the corner generally do not sleep. At least they try very hard not to or have tricks to conceal it.

James — I never got his real name — was already in a corner chair when I sat down next to him. He was on his phone talking to what seemed like his literary agent about a short story he was writing.

James looked pretty bleary and wasted but not tattered. Homeless? Don’t know, but let’s say homeless enough.

When James finished the phone call, out of the blue he began talking to me, repeating much of what I had overheard. He told me he was an alcoholic with “a monstrous hangover.” A few hours earlier he had woken up on the subway but had no idea how he got there.

I let him do the talking. If he wanted to tell a good story, I was willing to listen.

James talked about the famous people he knew, the early morning opening hours of the liquor store half a block up Third (“an alkie knows which liquor stores open early”), and his jail time at Rikers Island, which inspired his unfinished short story. He talked about the last paragraph in Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake.”

When he stopped, I went back to my reading, and he went back to his phone. Then he abruptly fell asleep. No one in the place, including the employees, paid any attention to him.

But after a few minutes James began to moan in his sleep. It was a deep, loud, startling wail that sounded much more ominous — animal-like — than just a bad dream.

A man at the next table quickly jumped up and came over to James. I had noticed this man earlier when he moved from his table to sit with a young guy drinking coffee out of a McDonald’s cup. Different, part of the men in the corner.

This man who came over to James’ table was a very large black guy probably in his late 20s wearing a red track suit and a Bronx letter jacket.

“Bro, get up,” he said to James. “They’re going to kick you out. Come on. You ok? Do you need an ambulance?”

James didn’t answer at first. He was barely aware of his surroundings. “No ambulance,” he mumbled. “I’m ok.”

Soon a Starbucks employee was at the chair. “You need to leave.”

James nodded. The barista walked away, leaving that first guy alone with James.

James was shaky. His voice was weak. He slowly struggled to his feet, picked up the orange drink he had bought from the 7-11 across the street and began a slow, unsteady walk. He dropped the drink container onto the floor, struggled to pick it up, then stumbled out the door while the man in the Bronx jacket watched.

A Day In The Life

Obviously, this is not a full on happily ever after story. It’s not even close to definitive. Still, it illustrates an important point about dealing with people different from yourself. Best to describe it as a day in the life.

A day in the life, though, can teach life lessons.

The men in the corner, the baristas and the customers were all implicit stakeholders sharing a roughly hewn consensus about keeping things cool.

The man in the Bronx jacket had a stake because that keeps attention away from the corner and continues to give those men like him some slack.

The Starbucks employee stepped in but quickly stepped out once he thought the Bronx guy was taking charge because that made everything cool. James was now quiet.

None of the other customers reacted because things stayed in hand. Why would they leave?

And James at least got about an hour’s respite from the streets to get rid of his hangover.

No cops were called, no official authority, no coercion in the name of the law.

No doubt there are places like this in Hawaii.

Look, I don’t want to make a big deal out of this.

Yet it’s an important example of the ways that diversity leads to a kind of common sense. Not DIVERSITY in the usual political, big-deal, let’s-have-a mandated-cultural-diversity workshop sense.

Rather, diversity in an everyday way, being around people different from yourself because they happen to be sharing the same space.

At the Kips Bay Starbucks mixing and diversity are part of the deal. If you want to drink your Starbucks there, you adjust. If you want your customers to be happy, you keep a watchful eye — but not too watchful because that may cause a scene.

If you are the men in the corner, you learn what you can and can’t do in order to keep from being observed, and you help settle things down if someone threatens to get out of hand. You don’t want to lose access to a place that gives you a little space, a little time.

No doubt there are places like this in Hawaii. They are for the most part outside of our consciousness when we think of people without a place to live.

They shouldn’t be because Kips Bay is part of a strategy of encountering homeless people just as opening a shelter or Honolulu’s “compassionate disruption” is.

So we could use more Kips Bay settings and more appreciation of places in Hawaii where they already exist. Sure, this strategy involves stuff that’s small scale and unofficial. It is simply a piece of the ordinary.

And that’s a good thing.