I've taken to drinking a cup of tea in the park by the river in the early mornings before I get to work. From where I am in lower Manhattan the view is an urban one. North, a pier/playground that's part of the park, a barge dock, and on the Jersey side of the river, trees where the Palisades start. Directly across, a pair of twin 15-story yellow brick office buildings in Hoboken, as wide as they are tall, and smaller ones from previous decades beside them. South, the tops of pilings where two piers were removed, ferry landings and another pier/playground, and, in New Jersey, futuristic office towers. And, sticking way out into the river on the last pier I can see, a peaked fabric roof over a pavilion, at the end of a line of four identical lollipop-perfect trees. It's a peculiar, science-fiction-looking structure in an odd place, seemingly the middle of the river, and the clearly-not-natural alignment of the trees adds to the weirdness. Most days I can see the mounded green of Staten Island behind it; some days, because the wind usually comes from the west, the sky will be clear behind the tent and its trees while it's cloudy where I am. Yesterday the clouds hung very flat and low -- they were fixing to rain all day, in fact -- and absolutely nothing was visible behind the tent but a grayness without any features at all. Today, Staten Island was back. I'm getting very fond of this view.