Some days at the river, it's all about the quality of the light. Some days it's the colors, some the sounds.

Today it was the tee shirts.

Cool, beautiful, not yet hot, runners out in numbers. A guy with an eagle swooping in on the front of his shirt, flying away on the back. A horse, a penguin. Two guys about five minutes apart in identical half-marathon shirts, must have finished the same race. A herd of cities ran by -- Dayton, London, Atlanta, Paris, and of course Brooklyn. A shirt that only said, ominously and in big letters, GIVE BLOOD. Schools were well represented: Amherst, Princeton, Chicago, Harvard, UConn, NYU.

The best, though, was on a lawyer I know, a criminal defense attorney. In NYS you have to be certified if you're going to handle death penalty cases. Like any other professional certification, you need to attend seminars, etc., to keep it up. This shirt was from one such four-day seminar, in Santa Cruz. It read, "Death Penalty College."