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   From across the pond a child had dreamt what are memories now. What the books and films and songs had suggested was all true – the cities were as vast as they were tall and their lights always a million more than fathomable, and all the expected unusual cars were parked in all the right alleys. Taming those dreams and turning them into domesticated realities did not leave the man with less, but more; for the cities’ unsung, unanticipated, unimaginable tales were the sweetest. Whispered and inaudible from afar, they were of the kind no one but oneself could find, up close, with the right ear pressed against the pulse. Like the time he heard someone play the public piano and could almost decipher the pianist’s motives in the notes. And that strange, tingly, crisp feeling of frozen nostrils on deep winter days. And all the cool back alleys with their ivy towers and warm backyards. And maybe most of all he loved the human blend, which was rich and fresh here. Diversity, once a foreign concept to the kid – when people were just people, not subsets of people labeled with superfluous minority-adjectives – was something he had long learned to perceive and acknowledge, and he thought the local abundance beautiful, while dreaming of returning to a future where diversity was implied again, like it was for the child.

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