Good Riddance, August

Here’s how August 2010 ends in New York. At the corner of Grand Street and Clinton, on the Lower East Side, with the temperature approaching 100 degrees, an old man in a light-blue polo shirt is being pushed in a wheelchair by his caretaker. “Not this way!” he shouts, as she noses him into the crosswalk on Grand. He points west, across Clinton. “I want to go there!” She continues, and calmly explains to him that they need to go in the direction they’re going. Maybe they’re going to the Rite-Aid on the corner, maybe the kosher butcher down the block. “No,” he says, “the other way! Bring me the other way!” He twists his head around, straining to see her face. It looks like he’d bite her if he could. “The other way!”

This was a particularly shitty month in a summer full of them. And I’m happy to see it go. Here’s to September.