The Next Best Thing

Today in Union Square: a belly dancer, a brass band, the fresh memory of a little boy’s voice at Whole Foods (“Mom, can my other treat be a Rice Dream chocolate bar, if we take the chocolate off?”) and the now slightly less vivid memory of throngs gathering here, prohibited by barricades from passing below 14th Street—which a perceptive friend had likened to a mob trying to walk to Europe but getting stopped by the ocean. It is hard to know whether to cling to that memory and insist that the details never fade, or to embrace what Gerda Weissmann Klein has called “the magic of a boring evening at home.”