Thursday, May 15, 2008

It's the Little Things

Sometimes the details just line up and mean more than the sum of their parts. Today I had a friendlier-than-usual exchange with a fellow bus passenger, and I was having one of those Good Commute Tunes days (mostly indie rock, with more Sinatra than chance would seem to demand). But it was a cloudy damp day, and my head was aching dully, so it wasn't exactly an ideal morning.

Then I had one of those moments that's hard to describe. After a note-perfect Guided by Voices song, and a Sinatra tune I actually bumped forward about halfway through, I got the beautiful, plaintive 'Raincloud' by Leah Siegel. Had me in a nice place, and then just as she sang '...the way you feel the sun crashing down on the horizon' the sun broke through the clouds and cast a light that was, let's not be overly dramatic and call it 'miraculous,' but it was stunning. And it drew my attention to one of those buildings that I've surely passed dozens (hundreds?) of times but never really noticed - one of countless structures in New York which have a singular beauty but which all too often blend into undeserved obscurity because of the simple volume of Big Buildings on this island.

But not today. Today, as Leah's guitars made the case for love, I took in the levels of this building, noticed how the details catch the light, saw where arched windows had been bricked over, caught a sign that has probably been hanging in a window for 30 years or more.

Don't have a photo to share with you guys about it, but I wanted to recognize the moment.

And in other news, it's Free Iced Coffee Day at Dunkin Donuts.

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