Wednesday in the Park

Today it's raining though my column for this week evokes a sunny day. It's raining and Wall Street is crumbling but I look around and see this:

1) People moving about and smiling at each other's dogs just the same.

2) Acts of kindness: the liveried man outside the big hotel notes my troubled face when I find his lot full and takes my car for me and parks it smack in front and charges me just ten bucks though I am gone nearly three hours.

3) The chance always for a smile: The Gypsy Rose School of Pole Dancing is right there beside the fancy photographic studio where I am going to get my picture taken because the Girl Scouts have asked me to as a former Leading Woman. Ruth Bramson, the great new CEO of these Girl  Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts, wants to activate all us former Leading Women; hang our portraits and get us back to mentoring those 55,000 young ladies, which is more than fine by me. Last year, when I offered a class for their Beyond Bars program I had so much fun my face hurt from smiling. (Beyond Bars brings Girl Scouts and Brownies into our two women's correctional facilities so they can have their troop meetings with their mums.)

But I guess what I should say is that I saw these things rather than that I see them because it was yesterday really and the sun shone just as it did the day I wrote this column which you will also find at the top of my home page here.

So let's have some pictures of that day now: The smokers referred to there, looking so calm and iconic you'd think they'd been there forever, like the hillside they sit on. 

The new and the old: Boston City Hall finished in 1968 and therefore brand-new in our minds,  juxtaposed with the Old North Church of "One If By Land Two if  By Sea" fame built almost 300 years ago: 

 

 

And finally a man waiting for what he needs to feel normal...

 

    

...which is all any drinker is trying to do when he drinks: Just feel normal. Just feel the way the rest of us feel when we get up, come sunny day or rainy day. We stand and stretch and the molecules sing and the bright blood froths and even the dourest among us must think - HAS to think - "Thank you God, for quick life and this new day to enjoy it in."

May He - or She - watch over us all today, the dogs and the pigeons, the smokers and the drinkers, the pole dancers, the troop leaders and the elected officials especially in whom we have placed so much trust.