New York City, January 17, 2013

★★★ The first glimpse of dawn was a wash of watery yellow and watery blue, showing which way was east in a dark and otherwise directionless canyon of Midtown, where the Town Car waited. The grays in the sky blended with the smoke of a mail truck going up in flames on 10th Avenue, yellow fire licking up out of the engine compartment. For the normal walk to kindergarten, there was a normal morning sky of loose white-and-gray clouds moving against the blue. Bright patches were everywhere into afternoon, out the cab windows, out the car windows. But the clouds thickened and thickened some more, the motion and variety slowly sinking into monotony. Cold monotony.