During our mid-afternoon stroll through the park, Les and I came across a crime scene investigation of harrowing proportions—bloated blue fabric and what appears to be the hood of a sweatshirt visible just above the frozen surface of the Harlem Meer, the body surrounded by a battalion of police vehicles and investigators. A brave investigator in an orange jumpsuit crawled across the ice to verify that what we’re looking at is indeed a dead body. Now they’re trying to figure out a way to fish the corpse out as hordes of my fellow citizens look on in fascination. (It’s perhaps a tad ironic that the scene is clearly visible from the double decker tour buses that prowl Fifth Avenue.) I can’t figure out what’s more disturbing: that I can see this all unfolding from my apartment windows or that I must have walked by that dark patch in the lake a half dozen times in the past few days, blithely unaware that I was in the presence of death.

Even in the garden…