SEPTEMBER 17, 2017 3:43 PM
My Aunt Alice, a professional writer, always told me to try to write about how it makes you feel. Last night, in the turmoil of multi-tasking with a hand-held device, this photograph popped up from the electronic files, purely by chance. No one has ever seen it. I was standing alone, it was warm, on a shirtsleeve day of Indian Summer, stopping to change busses for the next crosstown near East 72nd Street, filling empty hours at the beginning of an endless, three-month contract away from home (it was my last engagement, by personal choice). I was missing the calm of Paris, but full of gratitude to have been able to wander, one more time, through the halls of my beloved Metropolitan Museum – a freshly renewed membership card promised unlimited future visits – and seized by the view of this moment of exceptional peace and play in a man-made and yet wonderfully natural world: Central Park thriving perfectly, as it always has done, without me. I imagined, from behind the stone barrier, a still and timeless Arcadia, and became deeply aware that my remaining hours at this place, in this world, are numbered…