He was escorting her only up to the bus-stop at the end of the block, but there were so many interludes in the going.  Almost anything distracted them enough to make them stop and investigate and talk it through:  it was the slowest he had ever strolled that block.  An oversized flag got them talking of violent movies, a cone of icecream about their love for snow, the ATM about feeling forced to relate to machines for the good of the economy.  When the block did quite suddenly end, the bus-stop got them talking about places they yearned to visit.  He wished for this stop to be a comma and not a period.  As though flowing from that, she reached for his hand to cross the street.  The distractions they had been sharing moved as if to a periphery.  Their hands were in each other’s, and nothing on the remaining blocks of the boulevard had the magnetism now to distract them from that.