The best part of that year wasn’t spent in any fancy restaurants, and no one had to spend hundreds of dollars on a new dress.  It was one of those absurdly simple evenings right after a rain, and the rain was the single most important factor in all of this.  If it weren’t raining, there would be no simple memory, and this story would be in a fancy restaurant.  We were both obsessed with dancing on sidewalks, fedora hats, and the smell of old libraries.  We were obsessed with so many things, and some might even say we were obsessed with obsession.

The best part of that adventure for that particular year started when we were checking in late for our New York airport hotel.  We didn’t plan to stay long, anyway, and it was even less time now that we were late.  There are always good reasons for lateness, and we certainly had ours, but they didn’t have anything to do with anything remotely romantic, at least not until we could see it in retrospect.  We were in a taxi, and there was a bridge, and an old man who looked a little bit like Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas, and a little like my grandfather, the man who’d been part of the band of broken men crossing the country in trains back in the days of the Depression.

She wanted to give him a little extra money for his troubles, and I thought it would make a good picture.  By the time the cab pulled over, however, he was nowhere to be found.  There was only a picture on the ground where he was standing.  A younger version of himself, apparently, standing on a corner in the rain, with his arm around a woman in a pill-box hat.  It might have been leopard skinned.  They had a mischievous look behind the eyes, like they were just caught dancing in a zone where no one was supposed to be smiling.  We both looked at the photo together, despite the cab driver’s calls that we needed to get moving.  The faces in the photo looked eerily like us, like we’d found a previous version of ourselves, caught for a moment in time on a bridge between boroughs, wondering who we might become.