We spend a lot of time in this space talking about what's broken — the budget, the bureaucracy, the buses that never come. So consider this a brief intermission.

Picture it: a quiet San Francisco street, an elderly Asian couple walking hand-in-hand toward a bus stop. He slows down. She keeps going. Without even turning around, she's waving him forward — c'mon, c'mon, c'mon! Hurry up! — like she's conducted this exact orchestra a thousand times before.

As one local resident put it after witnessing the scene: "The poor bastard. I can't help but think they must still be in love. Of course they are. How cool is that?"

Pretty cool, actually.

There's something quietly radical about two people who've clearly been doing this for decades still holding hands on a Tuesday afternoon. No algorithm matched them. No app optimized their compatibility score. They just figured it out — the hard way, the slow way, the way that involves one person perpetually walking too fast and the other perpetually not walking fast enough.

We talk a lot about what makes a city livable. Usually it's about housing costs, transit reliability, whether you can walk to the store without stepping over a broken car window. And all of that matters. But the real measure of a city is whether people still want to build lives in it — long lives, boring lives, the kind of lives where you're still nagging your partner to keep up at the bus stop when you're both in your eighties.

San Francisco has real problems. We'll get back to cataloging them tomorrow, trust us. But the city also still has this: two people, hand in hand, heading somewhere together. No government program produced that. No tax incentive encouraged it. It's just two free people choosing each other, again, on an ordinary afternoon.

Call it sappy. We don't care either. This is how the world is supposed to work.