New York City, September 11, 2012

★★★★★ A day all its own. Nothing was going to stop the people who insisted on wringing dramatic ironies from a pathetic fallacy, and so the standard nonsense went out about how eerily identical this fine September weather was to the fine weather on the same date in another September. For the record, should anyone care about the record, at 9 a.m. the temperature was in the mid to upper 50s, a full 10 degrees cooler than it had been 11 years before. The sky was not a faultless blue, but washed with whiteness, especially at the horizon. On Prince Street, a man walked by in a fireman’s dress uniform, the double rows of buttons opened. On the other side of the street, crew unloaded parts for scaffolding. Facing downtown, the glare was a little hard to take.