Never Rains But It Pours
<<2003-03-23 - 12:48 p.m.>>

Summer rain, summer rain. A hot and sticky late afternoon, then that moment when the sky crashes and bursts open, the sudden glee of the people on the street, the feeling that nature has not forgotten us just because we live in New York City, a concrete forest. In New York, summer rain brings laughter and shrieking and twirling slowly in circles with my arms outstretched to the surface like rain brings worms to the surface here.

Beautiful, beautiful, and Monday evenings in Bryant Park waiting for the movie to start, lying on a sheet and sharing lukewarm bottles of soda with friends who are laughing and talking and cheating at travel Scrabble. And Sixth Street in the summer, the way the smells permeate, shift and swim into each other, the way you can smell Sixth Street from around the corner because the heat carries the scent. Friday nights at Rose of Bombay with Chloë and Nikki and the waiters glad to see us after our long absence.

Central Park in the summer! The Ramble dappled by sunlight, shaded and welcoming; baseball games on the Great Lawn; fields of people lying sprawled and sleepy; Belvedere rising solid and proud. And the Delacorte, and seeing Shakespeare in the Park twice—once with my family, house seats, no waiting on line, and once with Chloë, meeting her early in the morning with blankets and breakfast to wait the morning and early afternoon out in the service of an evening of free Shakespeare, sometimes mediocre but never unexciting, and conversation with the people next to us.

The relief of movie theaters, and the unbounded time to see all the movies I want without buses or driving, the ability to pick up and walk to the Union Square theater via the 14th Street Tasti location and settle into a deep seat with the coolness congealing on my skin. Or a double feature at the Angelika and sushi afterward, at that long upstairs restaurant across Houston.

Or the serene relief of museums, the Met or the Natural History and their old stones holding in some hallowed darkness, even the Guggenheim or the Whitney an enclave.

Baseball games in the summer, Yankee Stadium lit brilliantly, my family seated luxuriously in my father's friend's incredible seats, resting cold soda bottles on the backs of our necks, the crowd one organism, pulsing and roaring, everyone praying for the sun to go down so that we will be less sweltering, and then it does, and only the lights of the stadium remain, lighting the impossibly vivid field and the players in the pinstripes for which my father has such admiration.

Theater with my father, Emack and Bolio's, free concerts in the park, swingdancing in Lincoln Center, my city, my city in summer.

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