A Moment at Macy's

Last week, I was descending from the top floor of the downtown Macy's, after a fruitless search for curtains. (For some reason, the downtown Macy's sells no window treatments.) As I switched from the sleek art moderne escalators above the fifth floor to the newer ones, where the magic usually ends for me, I listened closely to the store music system. That couldn't be.

But it was! The downtown Macy's indeed was playing Joanna Newsom's "Sadie." I came down from the dour second floor into the bright tall-ceilinged first floor full of the feeling that song can bring -- a feeling that the time is made up of a succession of small miracles and that the world is comprised of millions of beautiful things. At the downtown Macy's!

After the song ended, the music returned to a string of bad covers. I lingered, hoping to get another unexpected song. Had one played, I would certainly not have had such a good lunch break, because the singularity of "Sadie" was far more impressive than a string of such gems would have been. Needless to write, I returned to the office in unusually high spirits.