This morning as I walked,  I was taken by surprise. A deafening orchestra of birds overhead. Thousands of them. Hidden among leaves and branches, they were invisible, until they took flight as one, beating the air and leaving nothing but silence and the patter of debris and small nuts falling to the ground. That silence felt like loneliness, or the absence of someone very dear to me. The birds go, while we stay. This is the nature of things. You can’t help but watch them with a longing melancholy eye as they vanish

into thin air.

I wasn’t the only one with my eye trained on a departure. As I walked out of the park, I saw these two, just like this, watching a train go by. Father and son, wordless, each with his own mental caption for the scene below. The father, casual, resigned, so in love with his son. The boy tense with excitement and sadness that the churning machine had passed him by. “There will be another one, soon.” My children always asked to be held high, just like this, to watch the trains go by. Just like this. Sometimes the engineer would see them clutching the chain link fence and blow the whistle. Those times are gone, vanished

into thin air.

From there, I was off to meet a friend, way down Vincenzo Monti, under the arching trees that keep the street dark even as the sun asserts itself overhead. We had coffee, raspberry kipferls. We talked of old times and recent times. It was chilly. The air is changing. Fall is here in so many ways. Fortunately, there are people who have thought of that, draping scarves on each bistro chair so that old friends meeting after so much time can talk, warm, wrapped in scarlet to ward off the chill as the cappucinos’ steam and the stories of yesterday vanish

into thin air.