New York City, July 12, 2015

★★★★ It was hard to tell if the sun had been up when the drinking glass — kicked from the top of a filing cabinet by a foot escaping the bottom rail of the top bunk — smashed on the floor. Certainly the daylight was coming around the edges of the blinds by the time the last of the discoverable shards had been swept or wiped up. Hours later, in the full sun, the asphalt patching on the edge of the half-rebuilt roadway of Amsterdam Avenue was oozing tar. In the Park, the grass was dry enough to sit on to eat lunch, or to snub a sandwich and eat pastries. Garbage waiting at a collection point spread noisome fumes over the pathway. The children set off to try to find a playground and abandoned the search in favor of climbing rocks, scrambling up and down in the dappled and bearable shade. Clouds covered the late afternoon, the dimmed sun still standing surprisingly high in the sky. The air in the piano lesson was enervating. Evening was blue again and still hot to walk out into. Pink bars spread in the west, and pink traced the water off a point on the New Jersey bank of the river.