Deborah and I are standing at the intersection of 55th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. We have just enjoyed a marvelous dinner with old friends. They head home, and we to our hotel. It’s late and it’s raining. But we just aren’t ready to go to bed yet in this famously insomniac city. So we head to one of our favorite haunts, the King Cole Bar at the Saint Regis Hotel, to enjoy a couple of perfect dry martinis. 

As we wait for a walk light, my eyes are transfixed on the reflections in the water on the street. It is so strange where beauty meets us. Who could have imagined the colors, the light, the shimmer and wonder of a wet street? For just a moment, it felt to me that all of New York City was reflected on that worn surface: the unlikeliness of it, its inevitability, the exquisite revealed in the merely necessary, as cabs hurtled down Fifth Avenue, as people hustled along oblivious to the miracle. 

Somehow I knew even then, that this moment would find its way onto canvas.