We walked past the corner with the sidewalk wet with rain and the bitter perfume of cheap bodega flowers hit me and brought me back in time to every instant this has ever happened, three or four times a year maybe for twenty five years, always the same, a perennial odor of the City.

The moon’s a crescent, shadowed by the earth this time, but isn’t that just as remarkable when you think about it, though it happens every month not every twenty years?