When Jack said, “You wouldn’t catch me dead on a street named Temperance.” I didn’t know what he meant.

“Why? I asked.

“You know what Temperance means?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t. “

Jack wrote for a local newspaper. He loved to talk and educate and waved his vocabulary like a sword.

“The land that is Temperance Street was donated to the city by the Temperance Society on the condition that alcohol not be sold or used on the premises for eternity!”

“That is hilarious… I live in an art studio above a bar that sells alcohol legally and every drug from crack to heroin is sold there under the table illegally.”

The last time I saw Jack I was chasing him down the street for something he said that I took offense to but now I don’t remember what. We were both lit and whatever it was had faded into the ether of time.

After I left Temperance Street they turned the bike courier bar into a respectable restaurant or at least that’s how it appeared a decade later from their fabulous street level patio with perhaps the finest urban view in the city… according to a restaurant food critic I overhead.