New York City, August 22, 2012

★★★ Rear-guard action from a retreating season. Morning seemed like liberated territory, but summer counterattacked in the middle of the day. The southern sky was the color of cigarette ash. Sunglasses on the passing faces. Sunglasses, sunglasses. A traffic cop was wearing shorts. Jeans were leaden on my legs. An error of judgment. Then I looked down and remembered they weren’t jeans at all. The office air conditioner shared the confusion, goaded into refrigerator temperatures. Then the heat fell back again. On the way home, the subway steps led up into cool air — and thence into a stalled and churning mass of pedestrians, penned off by police barricades to clear the way for a presidential fundraiser. Michael Jordan, Lincoln Center. If you had to be forced to walk around the block the wrong way, it was a decent enough evening for it.