The winds were island winds swirling off the Hudson.
At Riverside Park a small black boy climbed out of the trees and chased his baseball cap through the gutter as it tumbled away. At Lincoln Center in front of Avery Fisher Hall a fashion model returning home from another round of go-sees stepped into a tiny whirlwind of swirling city debris and felt a speck of grit lodge itself beneath her green-tinted contact lens. In mid-town a stack of the New York Times tugged at its paperweight, inching it off-center.
The winds coursed through the wide city streets, swept upwards in a sudden rush against skyscrapers and high-rises to disperse slowly into the calmer air above. By far the winds blew strongest west to southeast — the cool ocean breeze out of the east stopped them dead, forcing steel-and-concrete superheated air up to the cloudless sky like an uppercut to the chin of a boxer. Random currents reached eastward into the 80s and slid south down through the Village and Soho, though much diffused in power.
But mostly they poured through the open mouth of the west of Manhattan, down Riverside, down Columbus and Amsterdam, down Broadway, until other currents scattered them, eviscerating their inland thrust.
North as far as West 86th Street, south as far as 39th, east to Central Park and in pockets beyond, Manhattanites, tourists, and bus-and-tunnel commuters to New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island and Connecticut could be seen to pause a moment to sniff the air as something rushed by them and then darted swiftly on, something sweet, redolent of memories of near or distant pasts, of sunny summer days much like this one, when their worlds were simpler, easier.
Before the world and they grew old.