New York City, June 11, 2013

★★★★ Were the clouds moving by, the kindergartener asked, looking up and out the window, or were they coming together? The question would remain open, as the morning darkened and brightened. The air was unsettled, too, with a roiling vitality to it — warm but not hot, humid but not muggy, the breeze tumbling around in stimulating gusts. Downtown, walls of film-production trucks blocked the air flow, turning the sidewalk into a cattle chute. The light outside kept changing. Uptown, kindergarten snack time was being interrupted for a fire drill, pulling the children away from their cupcakes and out into an unexpected and undefended burst of rain. There was no such mischief on the way to dinner. A man holding a handful of Kit-Kat packages called out instructions in a foreign language to someone lowering a basket down the front of a building. In the open of Washington Square Park, where people were out to intentionally enjoy the conditions, the warmth edged up past the ideal. A sturdy-looking rainbow appeared in the fountain spray, obedient to basic optics, a tune-up exercise for what the sun was preparing: Outside the restaurant, after dessert, the western sky was white gold and Eighth Street was a spillway of light. Taxis, cased in amber, threw their shadows far ahead. Up Sixth Avenue, the sun stared straight through every cross street. The clouds were brushed with ecstatic shades of tan. The light exalted water tanks and ductwork, statuary and cornices and the mast of the Empire State Building. It sharpened the fading names over Herald Square: Landorf & Co., J.D. Sachs, Bo-Peep Mfg. Co. A gold glow suffused the entrance of the G.E. Building. Neoclassical and Deco detailing thrummed; the tall glass walls of the Time Warner Center and the Trump International looked wobbly and cheap. After sundown, in the still-warm dark, a couple leaned into one another at a curb cut at Broadway. Another pair passed hand-in-hand through the middle of Columbus Circle, past the electric-lit jets of the fountains.