New York City, April 15, 2015

★★★★★ The wage-protest march came rattling and chanting around the corner down below, across Amsterdam, and up the sidewalk. Dancers and their shadows stepped and turned; brass instruments gleamed; a cymbal flashed. In the quiet afterward, some meadow bird, a blackbird or oriole, glided over the new apartment building with a flare of color and dropped out of sight. The fountain of the apartment to the north sprayed its streams with no particular symmetry or structure. At 68th there were leaves out — leaves! — on the shortest trees on the Broadway median. Lines of schoolchildren, presumably exiled so as not to disturb other students’ high-stakes testing, processed this way and that. Six minutes was too long, much too long, to wait underground for a train. Shirtsleeves were out, and thighs. A man in a suit, necktie blowing back in the breeze, clambered up a low concrete barrier by Columbus Circle and teetered there for a moment, considering a perilous jaywalk. Downtown the heating posts were radiating unnecessary comfort at the sidewalk lunch tables. It was time to flee the dimness of the office for the roof, till the mounting fear of sunscreenlessness outweighed the dread of the dark. Helicopters stood still in the late-day sky and sirens blared in traffic. There was just enough of a chill gathering on the evening to warn that that was not to be taken for granted.