Rain
It's raining. The weather is cold and grey. It's not really that cold, but we're all ready for spring and sunshine, so the gloom is more oppressive than an outright blizzard would be. I ought to have worn other shoes to breakfast at the coffee shop across the street. Having worn my nice loafers, I ought to do something about the wet, but I don't think there's any neat's foot oil in the house. What on earth is "neat's foot oil"?
The sidewalk in front of our building, between the driveway and the corner, is covered by a sidewalk shed. (Who knows why.) What slays me is the people who hold up their umbrellas beneath it, their attention so elsewhere that they don't register the superfluity.
The reason I wear my nice loafers is to hear them click in a grown-up way on the lobby's terrazzo floor. In this age of soft sneakers, my loafers are almost as percussive as the shoes of teenaged coolios who, forty years ago, nailed taps onto their soles. Crossing the hardwood floors of the Met's Old Master galleries the other day, my shoes gave a voluble account of the pictures that interested me, and for how long.
