I’ll admit I’m getting a bit worried. The homeless man who hangs out at Grand Army Plaza every morning hasn’t shown up for about a week now.

He has been there for years without fail, save one brief period, occupying a seat on the platform during the morning commute, and gone in the evening. When a homeless person doesn’t make his appointed stops, there’s a reason. We all have our routines.

There’s something about this guy that’s a little bit different. Something about him I like. He’s Burmese (as I overheard him tell another woman one day) with stringy gray hair down the middle of his back, but so sparse on top his scalp is visible. He pushes a shopping cart that’s been rigged like this: the front end has been sawed off so that only the handle and back wheels are in tact, and in place of the missing basket is a granny cart held on by bungee cords.

Despite the fact that all of his earthly possessions fit inside a shopping cart (or perhaps because of it) he seems, to me, to be a genuinely happy guy. He works on the sudoku puzzle in one of the free morning newspapers. He eats bagged salad with chopsticks and washes it down with Coke swigged from the bottle. He watches the comings and goings of the trains like a Buddha. He laughs a lot. I don’t know if it’s with us frantic commuters or at us.

Maybe he moved on to greener pastures like Union Square, suddenly deciding that Grand Army Plaza was no longer appealing. The last time he disappeared for several days, he returned with this latest cart incarnation. Of course the cynical side of me assumes that the old one had been cart-jacked during some sort of scuffle, but he might have just figured he needed new wheels.

I know one other Burmese man who goes by the name So. So works in my building as a greeter. (Though knowing my company, his official title is probably something along the lines of Executive Salutation Assistant.) This is the happiest man alive. He is relentlessly cheerful. He says hello to everyone who appears from the elevator bank in a grand sing-songy voice. There is something about So’s energy that is so peaceful and calm, your spirits are lifted immediately. Even the normally grumpy bike messengers offer a handshake and a wave when they see him. Now he’s trying to expand his English by watching television and picking up bits and pieces from his co-workers.

“Hello! It crazy, sick cold outside, yes?” (Laugh) “My bum about to sweat off.” (Another laugh) “You got one package waiting here for you, okay?”

I’ve been teaching him a few words in Italian because he wanted to know. Now he also says things like, “Ciao! Buon giorno!” as he walks the halls for his hourly rounds. In exchange he tells me things about his country. “We like food things hot, hot, hot. Too hot for you, yes. But a-okay for me!” (Smile and laugh)

I don’t know much about So’s life in Burma (now Myanmar), but I suspect it wasn’t cushy, probably much like my friend on the train platform. Yet they both give off a serenity and happiness that can’t be faked. Is it because they have learned to be truly grateful for what little they may already have rather than deciding to be happy only when they acquire a laundry list of things? Maybe it’s as So succinctly put it one day, “It so easy. You just smile. Okay?”

I hope I see the guy on the Grand Army platform again soon. I’ll give him a big smile and the sudoku puzzle book I’ve taken to carrying around with me. Just in case.

Jacquelin Cangro

Pfft — diamonds.

There was a silly little girl in line behind me at Victoria’s Secret a while back who said to a girlfriend, "You know, it’s not even about him. I just want that ring on my finger." Ah, the basis for a long-lasting marriage.

Aesthetically, diamonds are dull. Clear, sparkly, round, blah, blah, blah. Historically, they were rare. But even before I read the 1982 Atlantic Monthly article, I suspected that if nearly everyone had a diamond in some form or another (not to mention the vaults full of them all over the world), they were not rare, not valuable, not special.

In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

Oh no — you have a supply of junk but want the cash to keep rolling in? Well, just form a company and get a slogan.

The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever — "forever" in the sense that they should never be resold.

But, how, oh how to convince gullible people to buy something they don’t need. Why, you need advertising professionals!

The appraisers at Empire Diamonds examine thousands of diamonds a month but rarely turn up a diamond of extraordinary quality. Almost all the diamonds they find are slightly flawed, off-color, commercial-grade diamonds. The chief appraiser says, "When most of these diamonds were purchased, American women were concerned with the size of the diamond, not its intrinsic quality." He points out that the setting frequently conceals flaws and adds, "The sort of flawless, investment-grade diamond one reads about is almost never found in jewelry."

But who cares — the masses have been convinced. Now, about those teeny tiny rocks dug up in the Soviet Union that are hitting the market: lather, rinse, repeat.

The diamond market had to be further restructured in the mid-1960s to accomodate a surfeit of minute diamonds, which De Beers undertook to market for the Soviets. They had discovered diamond mines in Siberia, after intensive exploration, in the late 1950s: De Beers and its allies no longer controlled the diamond supply, and realized that open competition with the Soviets would inevitably lead, as Harry Oppenheimer gingerly put it, to "price fluctuations,"which would weaken the carefully cultivated confidence of the public in the value of diamonds.

… De Beers devised the "eternity ring," made up of as many as twenty-five tiny Soviet diamonds, which could be sold to an entirely new market of older married women. The advertising campaign was based on the theme of recaptured love. Again, sentiments were born out of necessity: older American women received a ring of miniature diamonds because of the needs of a South African corporation to accommodate the Soviet Union.

Imagine — all this time you’ve been concerned about heroin and gas supporting terrorism. You never even thought that the "symbol" on your finger once funded those dirty commies!

Jennifer Leblanc