My Future Wife In Manhattan, Near Me With Basil

She is, in certain fractions of the calendar, six years younger than me.

When this picture was taken, I'd flown back from Switzerland through Iceland and had just taken a jet-lagged cab right past her on Washington Square. We had crossed paths before in London, but probably not so near. I was heading south from 76th Street with Eliot, to meet Robert De Niro's father, an artist in Tribeca.

If a car had slowed, if a truck had turned, if a transmission had failed, I might have looked to my right on a warm Spring night, stopping to see my future wife in the evening lights. Life is funny. All those taxis and time lapses, before we took the same flights.