New York City, April 30, 2015

★★★★ Daylight glowed through the thick curtains at the back of the restaurant. A man at the next table played birdsongs on his phone. Dogwood flowers were out beside the church. Pear blossoms met in midair to put a ceiling over the cross street. It was light-sweater weather, cool and fine in a completely different mode than the warm fineness the day before. A woman threw fistfuls of crumbs to the sidewalk, watched by pigeons on the post-office wall, among them a squab in its mangy new feathers. Out in the brick plaza, children hunkered down with magnifying glasses, trying to burn things. Above the thin silvery clouds ran a whiter contrail, straight and thick despite being an agglomeration of little round puffs, like something made with bursts of the old MacPaint spray tool.