MOIST

Summer is hanging on here. Nary a sign of fall to be had, no trees changing color, no crisp snap in the air. In fact, today was overcast with a bit of rain and as humid as Hawaii. A nice heavy atmosphere that gets you good and moist walking to the subway and in the subway.

I went for a run in the park and finally noticed Cleopatra’s Needle. I knew it was behind the Met but I kept missing it until Cara told me where to look after seeing it on one of her training runs this week. It kinda poked out from some scrubs on a small hillside not too far from the Alexander Hamilton statue. Hard to believe it was hauled all the way over from Egypt and is over 2500 years old. One side of it was slowly getting erased, with its Hieroglyphics melting off from what is probably acid rain over the years. Nothing lasts forever, but that thing is beating the odds.

I was passed on the bridal trail by a youthful phalanx of high-school cross-country runners that impressed me with the power and beauty of youth. In fact, the whole park with filled with kids and teams of all sorts; a boy’s soccer team doing warm-up drills and shouting some victory chant in unison, herds of boys struggling up hills while others sprinted by, and of course a bum heading into the woods with his paper-bag booze protector. It’s all so poetic in this place, this verdant, heady park, like some Robert Frost poem about the color green.