New York City, December 14, 2014

★★★ The morning sky was all gray clouds with soft ridges. By lunchtime, some of the ridges downriver and in the west had become channels of light blue. The air was humid and mild. Insisting on the heavy coats for the children seemed like it had been pointless. Then the seven-year-old tripped and fell and lay screaming but unscathed in his padded coat on the sidewalk, and in the confusion the three-year-old lost his shoulder-riding perch and plunged backward, full-height, all the way down to the pavement — to land square on the thick back and bunched hood of his own coat, and incredibly on nothing else, head and neck never even grazing the ground. Nothing spilled but tears, wetting the windproof fabric, and even those passed soon enough. In the time it took to ride over to Grand Central’s model trains and back, the sky had cleared out utterly, bafflingly. Things could change that fast. Men hawked novels from their new imprint at a sidewalk table. Enough clouds arrived low in the west to provide a neat orange-rimmed purple screen for the sun to descend behind.