2005-07-03 - 1:02 a.m.

Magic in New York City

Today got off to an amazingly slow start. K's visit to the embassy has produced a mound of paperwork. It turns out that I need to track down about five more documents, some of which need to be notarized. It required a full morning to make a dent in the workload, and I will be lucky if I can get all of the documents in the next two weeks.

Finally I was free to drive to Brooklyn to visit my friend Katherine. I arrived after a fairly eventful drive (got lost finding the entrance to the Parkway, and I don't even want to THINK about the number of illegal maneuvers I performed on the traffic circle at Grand Army Plaza...).

But in the end we had a wonderful day. We decided to spend the day simply hanging out. She cooked unch; we took a nap; did laundry; we went to the drugstore...all mundane things that are insignificant alone. But when you are chattering with a friend, these tasks zip by with a kind of holiday feeling.

Katherine lives in Park Slope, half a block from Prospect Park. At about 7pm we decided to take her guitar out and sit in the park while she played. Katherine is a superb musician, but she didn't have a chance against the supersonic booms of the stereo blasting soca music from the picnic across the green from us. Nevertheless I enjoyed hearing a few disjointed chords through the soca music.

Mostly we lay back on the blanket and watched the sky. We saw about 20 airplanes zoom overhead, but more interesting were the butterflies, the dragonflies, the waterfowl, and then, ultimately, the bats. When we finally sat up from the blanket, dusk was firmly upon us. Rabbits had emerged from the woods, and a thousand fireflies awoke and rose from the ground all around us. It was like floating in a cloud of green light.

We both made wishes, and just for a moment understood how people could believe in fairies. More than anything we knew that this moment was one that neither of us would forget - a piece of magic in New York City.