1. It All Began

Part One
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It all begin with Chris and Tom on a San Francisco sidewalk. Chris was enumerating his favorite cliches.

"My grandmother used to say", he said, "'from your mouth to God's ear'"

"That's it!" Tom declared.

"That's what?" asked his friend.

"That's how you and I will change the world."

"Okay", Chris replied. He had always wanted to change the world.

The sidewalk, since you asked, was along Kearny Street near Post. It was a cold, foggy and windy evening. The two young men were bundled up and walking towards the Montgomery Street Muni Station on their way home after work. Chris would take the N-Judah back to the Inner Sunset, and Tom would take the J-Church to Noe Valley.

"I know what you're thinking", Tom said.

"Really?" Chris was genuinely curious. Was Tom a mind-reader after all? It would be news to him.

"You're thinking this is just another one of my hare-brained schemes that I'll forget about immediately and it would have come to nothing anyway, but you're wrong."

"I'm wrong?" Chris thought about this for a moment. It's quite possible I'm wrong, he decided, even if that is not what I was thinking, which it wasn't.

Chris was the older of the two, in his late twenties, tall, fair and expanding. Tom, in his earlies, was a carnival mirror image of his pal, short, dark and wasting away.

"Not this time." Tom declared. "Listen, we are always having lots of good ideas about how to make the world a better place, right?"

"Sure", Chris was being agreeable. Already his mind was on dinner, his favorite time of the day. Tonight there would be pork chops. He was convinced of that, although as far as he knew there were none at his house. One of his roommates might have brought some. It was always a possibility.

"So how come none of our good ideas ever make anything happen?"

"Um, because we're just a couple of shipping clerks working in the basement of a bankrupt bookstore?" Chris surmised.

"Exactly", Tom replied. "Every time we have one of those great ideas we're nobodies and we're nowhere. That's the essence of the problem as I see it."

"So", Chris was slow to reply, as they drew nearer to Market Street. "If we had those ideas when we were somewhere, and if we were somebodies, then. Then what?"

"No, no", Tom said, and instantly remembered a person he once knew who always began every sentence with the words "no, no", and Tom thought the guy was such a jerk for doing that, and here he was being that same jerk himself.

"I mean", he corrected himself, "that's not what I meant."

"Okay", Chris replied. It would often get like this. Most of those "great ideas" that Tom was referring to were vague half-uttered mumblings coming out of his friend that one could hardly even hear, let alone figure out what the heck.

"You know," Tom continued, "what I was saying about the spirit of the age."

"Oh right", Chris recalled and repeated, "people talking loudly in public in the vain hope of being overheard by someone more important."

"You remembered!", Tom was impressed. Usually he was convinced that no one even heard half of his obscurely spouted mutterings.

"I liked that one", Chris agreed, "it's right up there with 'shit or get off the pot'"

They were laughing as they entered the underground light rail station. From here they would usually wait on the platform interminably as any number of K, L, and M trains came by, with nary a J or an N in sight. Today, however, an N-Judah was waiting right there when they leaped off the bottom steps and Chris hurried onto it with a backward wave of goodbye. Tom had not yet gotten to the part about how. About how this idea was going to change the world.

He pulled out a small notepad from his jacket pocket, along with a bit of pencil, and rapidly scribbled down the rest of his idea before he forgot it. He wrote the following:

The right people in the right places at the right time, saying the right things in the right way - for starters.

Easy.

From there it was only a matter of who, where, when, what and how.