Settepani Interlude

The girl - maybe 20 - pouring coffee and boxing cakes this afternoon was sweet. I had just finished a 5.3 mile run across the Pulaski Bridge into Queens, along Kent Street (where a buxom woman was having her photograph taken with various sexual paraphernalia, on a backdrop of bricks), to the river, to the little park Under the BQE on Union and Metropolitan...and it had begun to rain. The barista was lamenting the downpour, as she was "going out into the City tonight." I misheard, thought she had mentioned a specific bar or restaurant, and asked her again where she was going. "Out into the City," she repeated with excitement. Growing up in Brooklyn, the City was perhaps as intoxicating a place for her as it once was for me, nearly 1,000 miles away in Rock Island. She wanted the rain to end because she was going to wear "a skirt and boots and everything." It has stopped raining, I'm heading "out into the City" myself shortly, and I hope she is already having a wonderful time.