New York City, October 2, 2013

★★★ The crown of one of the trees out on Broadway was showing a patch of red. There was yellow, too, in among the leaves in the neighboring tower complex, more and more of it once you started seeing it. Notwithstanding the colors, it was warm enough to bring the two-year-old out for preschool delivery in his shorts and t-shirt. He marched alongside his empty stroller, energized. Real heat built up through the day, the thick air bringing back annoyances that had seemed safely bygone — sweat dampening a pressed shirt, the harsh excesses of train air conditioning. In the shadows on the way to twilight, people with gray in their hair ate soft-serve ice cream cones. A stiff breeze, just cooler than lukewarm, poured down the long escalator on the way out of the Lexington Avenue station. The chatter through a bar’s tableside windows roared over the sidewalk. From inside a restaurant, with martini-sized martinis on the table, the view through the open air offered a procession of garbage trucks, clean-looking and majestic, rolling by in the night.