New York City, June 29, 2016

★★★★ White shirts and sneakers flared in the hard, direct sun. The humidity felt as if it had already saturated everything and was now seeping back out in all directions. The clouds were blurry but individual; gradually their edges sharpened and the day grew clearer. By rush hour they were silver and white, the clouds from the sky on some particular jigsaw puzzle assembled on the dining-room table decades ago. The dampness was gone, the temperature mild. There was no more school and there was light after dinner, so the children played tag in the slowly gathering dusk on the lawn—the lawn being the engineered grassy slope on the roof of the expensive restaurant on the edge of Lincoln Center. Two hawks met, with sharp cries, at the near corner of the top of the Juilliard dormitory tower. One flew a short distance and settled on a railing on another rooftop; the other went in long loops high in the now cloudless sky, slowly crossing the west and north and then hurtling southward with a sudden burst of speed, never flapping its wings. The eye lost it and found it again. Any fieldmarks were lost in the blood-red sunset light on its plumage. Below it, much nearer, danced the tiny dark specks of gnats.