New York City, November 2, 2016

★★★ What looked like a gray sky was just blue waiting for the sunrise. The arriving light pierced the black veil of netting under which workers were moving to prepare the emptied, once-modern house of worship to have a luxury tower dropped on its site. Green-brown leaves, trampled soft and shiny on the wet sidewalk, took on the character of dog turds, and perhaps the reverse. The temperature was a whole new random number, the atmosphere newly humid. Contrails stretched and warped against the sky. The door of the bar was open to let in the air, which was moving in currents neither identifiably warm nor cool.