New York City, October 28, 2015

★ It was still nighttime, the four-year-old complained, heading late out the door in his boots and rain jacket. It didn’t seem fair to tell him he was wrong, as bits of drizzle fell in the gloom. The drizzle became rain. The trees were not far enough along for this to be the storm that would wipe out the leaves and the color. “Umbrella, umbrella, umbrella,” chanted a man with a cartload at the top of the subway steps. Umbrellas, their raising and lowering, clogged and stalled the flow of people. Sometime in the afternoon, whatever tenuous daylight had been established ran out. In the four o’clock hour, a streetlight shone off the parking lot sign out the office window. The driving rain became dripping rain. Clouds erased a quarter billion or half a billion dollars in real estate from the top of One57. In the old hard-surfaced school auditorium, the air conditioner made a heavy racket for a while, then shut off, leaving the air thick and damp. Hours later, the meeting let out into what seemed to be nothing more than a few wayward drops of rain — and then a spray of rain, and moments later a downpour washing over the sidewalks, sending little white fountain jets arcing into the storm drain from the surging flood in the gutters. Maybe half of the six-block course to home was scaffolded; it was not enough.