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It’s all about what we see. At least this week. Let me explain.

At Walker and Elam, the place we call The Corner, walk into Bestway, and you’ll see folks staring, pacing, taking pictures and even whispering into their cell phones as if they’re sharing something sacred:

“They’ve got growlers from Carolina!”

They have a name for it at The Corner’s milk-and-bread mainstay since 1947.

The Wall of Beer.

Bestway’s new owners, Nancy and Roger Kimbrough, husband and wife, built their wall two weeks ago with this in mind: No. 1 seller in the No. 1 location.

So, along the store’s far left wall are 500 selections, some with weird names like Hop Stoopid and Old Leghumper.

I see those names every Friday night after deadline beats me silly. I stare. Then, I remember the wisdom of that brewer named Ben Franklin.

“Beer,’’ Franklin once said, “is proof that God loves us.”

***

Off South Eugene, you see them standing outside the Employment Security Commission, the faces of our country’s tough economy.

They stand in a line that sometimes wraps around the building. On Wednesday, I stopped and went in. And there, near the front door, in her tiny cubicle, I found Cathy Battle.

Battle, an employment consultant, has spent 34 years helping North Carolina’s unemployed find a job. She admits she’s seen some tough times.

But she’s never seen it this bad.

She sees 12 to 50 people every weekday. She sees the crying, hears the stories and clutches their hand for comfort when she hears the exclamations:

“I’m about to lose my house!”

“My wife says I’m not trying! But I am!”

And every time, she’ll point to a handwritten saying stuck to her computer — The end of the matter is better than the beginning — and she’ll tell them the same thing.

“There is hope,” she says. “No matter how bleak things look, if you can stay focused, there is hope.”

***

I saw it happen at home. Chris and Anita Faulkner saw it happen at the place they call Mecca: Chapel Hill.

On Monday night, they watched their alma mater win its fifth national basketball championship on the widescreen at the Smith Center. But this time, they were with their boys. And this time, they introduced them to Franklin Street.

They stayed out until 2 a.m. Bentley and Jackson saw fans climbing trees, making bonfires and high-fiving strangers in the middle of the street and yelling, “Go Heels!” Bentley and Jackson didn’t say a word.

The next day, the boys missed school. The Faulkners spent the night in a hotel so they could welcome the team home and see firsthand the craziness of college basketball colored Carolina blue.

By Wednesday, the Faulkners had resumed their school-day routine. But not without a question.

“What was the best part of our trip to Chapel Hill?” Chris asked Jackson, 7, his youngest.

“Dad,” Jackson responded, “it was the best day of my life.”

***

Then, there’s Harriet Barrett, Swarthmore College grad, class of ’45, local poet and writer of songs and prose. She’s 85. And she can barely see.

She has struggled with glaucoma for 20 years. Now, she’s been told she has a retinal artery blockage behind both eyes, an ailment so serious doctors are considering the need to operate.

But Harriet says no way. The operation into her brain is too risky, and she worries she could die. She believes she has so much more to say. So, she writes — even if she has to hold a magnifying glass to see the words coming from her pen.

“Writing is healing because it pulls out what I have stored in my head,” Harriet told me the other day. “I dream in color, and in the middle of the night, when I have all of this pouring out of me, I go into the other room, get a magnifying glass and get it all down.

“That’s why I’m terrified of the operation because if I lose what’s in here, forget it”’ she says, tapping her head. “It’s all about what I remember. What I’ve seen.”

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com