humidity returns

This whole city bumbles along slowly, despite all our pretenses at hustle and bustle. The heat of summer steadily creeps back, suddenly making the breeze that blows my page away something to be grateful for. My concentration scattered, I behold the scene around me. As things come into focus I realize with a start that the couple sitting near me just got engaged. They goggle at each other, the ring, back at each other, at their iPhones, back at the ring, back at each other - who knows how long this has been going on and all the while I've been oblivious. "Why couldn't you have proposed to me at the battery?" A woman scolds, before she returns to peppering her small child with questions: "What color is this, honey? Blue, good. What color is the grass? What color are your shoes? What color is my hair? No honey: brown. Can you say brown? Can you say that? Tommy? Good, now what color is my hair again?" She turns, "if we can just get him to learn his colors we can get into that preschool," she tells her husband searchingly. He nods. To my left a couple's argument dissolves in laughter. To my right a couple's argument dissolves in tears. Across the sidewalk a family picnics and a small girl sits on a lap, her colossal pink bow brushing against gray whiskers. He pats her knee, she giggles at him, safe in a world of trust. Twin boys no more than three race around a huge tree trunk. One trips, falls. The other, without hesitation, throws himself down to the ground as well. Their raucous laughter fills the air as their anxious mother, who had been expecting tears, settles back down to the grass. A family walks their microscopic dog between me and the water, and there in all their glory are the matching polka dotted mother-daughter Easter duds. The daughter doesn't seem to mind, I wonder if someday she will. Her tiny brother, on the other hand, tugs impatiently at his tiny polka dotted tie. Obvious tourists wander hungrily around the gazebo. One group stops, a bossy man orders them into positions for a picture. "No not there, here. No don't stand like that, put your arm - here let me show you. See, if you just stand like this...Okay now lean, oh crossed arms are a just great way to show we are happy, aren't they? now can you ju- what? What? Oh. Oh no I didn't realize the lens cap was on...nervous laugh, nervous laugh, okay just stand wherever." Even I have to chuckle at that one as I packed up my hefty tome and resolved to be reading a shorter something next time I lugged a book down to the Battery. I paid attention to these people for only five minutes, and that is all of their expansive, involved, eventful lives I will ever know. But that is not all there is, for "we have tomorrow bright before us like a flame." What color is a flame Tommy? Red? Good.