New York City, October 5, 2016

★★★★★ The kindergarten dropoff would have been pleasantly cool, but for the effects of walking down 27 flights wearing a hoodie, after two fully packed elevators had gone by. Three floors below the open window and to the left was a maintenance rig, from which a balcony railing was being uprooted with grinding noises. Out on Columbus Avenue a red neon sign glowed in the deep shade, and neon-red running shoes glowed in a patch of sun. The cross street was dim but an aura of light came down off the brick and stone above. The rudest of the skyscrapers south of the Park was washed out almost to the color of the sky, even as everything else stood solid and saturated. People had come out in the Wednesday afternoon to the Sheep Meadow, in the damp and grassy smell of it; a few insistent ones still sunbathed. There was an open bench by West Drive, with sun to soak into the face and the ankles, as the dark bronze face of Giuseppe Mazzini in the shadows looked over the purple plumes of the carriage horses going by. Gradually the sun slipped over behind the buildings. An ostentatiously loud portable music player on a nearby bench vied with an ostentatiously loud portable music player going by on a bicycle, and the people on the bench got up and moved on. Flying rings soared in their over-straight, over-serious lines above the meadow. A couple nestled into the niches of the biggest boulder and into one another as they sat gazing back across the open space. Mower tracks ran silver or deeper green across the grass, out of the sunlight now but still lit by the ambient brightness. At dusk, up in the 80s, the children came out of the opticians wearing their new or newly repaired glasses to see a sharp sliver of descending crescent moon.