The Denver paramedics were there in just a few minutes. They begin to provide the homeless woman with medical car, and then the loaded her onto a gurney and rolled her into the ambulance. They grabbed Beckie’s coat and threw it over the homeless woman.I expected Beckie to speak up, to say, please leave my coat. She didn’t. Later, when I asked her why she had not spoken up, asking the paramedics to leave her coat, she simply said, she needed it more than me.Here was Beckie Blake standing in the cold, at night, watching her nice coat go away. I could see her shivering, but she did not say anything.A couple days later, Beckie went to a second-hand store and bought herself another coat. This coat was not nice. It had tears and stains, holes in the pockets. It had a wild floral, almost hippy pattern. Certainly, not something that a woman as conservatively dressing as Beckie Blake would wear. The worst thing about this coat was that it had a distinctive smell. We all could tell immediately whenever Beckie came in wearing that coat.Smelly. Ugly. Stained. And, I did not know until many years later, it had been an expensive purchase. It was winter and this was the only coat left in the second-hand store. They priced it as if it had been new.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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