The smokestack of the old brewery rises above the river, red letters on white paint.  Behind it a drift of purple clouds swim on the sherbert colored sky. I sit with the sun setting to my right and the twilight rising to my left.  The air is still, but cooling off as the day wanes, and I can feel the chill between the slats of the bench as I lean back and on my bare shoulders.  The air is fresh and clear.

There’s a small rapid about 20 meters up the river to my right, and the babbling of the water over the rocks is almost loud enough to cover the baseline of the music playing a hundred meters or so down the river, where a fit young man with a bun of mousy brown hair is running an outdoor fitness class on the public riverside tennis court.  There’s a frog nearby, and the irregularity of his croak against the constancy of the bass is tugging at me. I keep trying to sync them in my mind, but the frog is not playing for me.

An egret stands across the river, wading in the bank.  The bright white of his feathers and graceful curve of his neck make him the star.  The cormorants are pretty, but they blend into the marshy grass around the river. Downstream, a few mallards make their way toward the egret and me.  They are pretty too, some with bright blue and green heads, but we had ducks in Central Park. I never saw an egret in New York, and they seem like a magical upgrade from the geese.  The egret spreads his impossibly wide wings and flies to the opposite bank, just feet from me. Two sets of rings, one emerging from where the egret took off and one from where he alighted ripple toward the center of the stream, merge, and still themselves.

A jogger passes by, his footsteps heavy and his breath strained.  He is leaning forward and clearly pushing through discomfort. As he approaches I see the sweat that’s accumulated around the collar of his blue shirt, and as he passes I see the wetness of his back.  He’s got a belly and some extra weight on his face and legs. People who see him in the grocery store or on his way to work probably don’t think much, but think running is a special kind of misery, so I am impressed.