Cellophane flowers . . .

. . . of yellow and green did not tower over my head as I made my up 6th through the stream of people on my way to Bed, Bath & Beyond to buy a measuring cup to replace the one I’d broke, the sun low and lighting up people’s faces with its yellow glow on my lunch hour, but I was overcome by the sight of the Blue Valley Deli & Grocery, seized by this realization: “We have delis and groceries!”

Guys were sitting in the window on vinyl-covered stools eating lunch, holding big hamburgers with one hand and talking with each other. Cooks thrashed away at fuming grills, a ribbon of grease smeared on the front window, a veil of steam condensing at the top of the glass. The world was revealing one of its secrets to me, like opening the back of a watch and seeing its works turning, this window a clockwork of hamburgers and hands and happy-faced men and puffing steam and flashing steel utensils, silent from my distance. Here was all as it should be in the middle of a pretty day in the middle of New York City, with its plenitude from the gum on the sidewalk to people hurrying by in their dun coats to the fading blue paint of the front door of the Blue Valley Deli & Grocery, a vision as sharp before me as a knife edge scraping against the whorls of my thumbprint. Picture yourself getting back today from a combat tour in Iraq and happening upon this impossible scene.