One afternoon years back, in a distant city, I found myself staring into the window display of a toy store that some ingenious window designer & puppet maker had fashioned of cardboard and papier-mâché & painted to look like the very street I was on: its luncheonette & canopied shops a perfect replica, down to that toy store itself, & out on the sidewalk, puppets jerking about on their shiny black strings like frenzied pedestrians racing in every direction. A couple with gift-wrapped boxes in both hands was stepping out of a doorway; there were elderly gents & ladies in high-fashion furs, sailors in white caps, a merchant in front of his shop stroking his mustache, a girl in red pumps, a kid on a bike & two on skateboards, businessmen clutching their attaché cases, a dowager walking three Pekingese, a small boy being pulled along by his mother, hard hats in T-shirts drilling into a cordoned-off piece of the roadway, a spastic dance of marionettes bouncing in place in that urgent, convulsive way puppets do: & none of them, needless to say, making the least bit of headway. The whole thing was at once striking & comic, but somehow mysterious too, & inexplicably touching. I stood there a long while, amused, appalled, & entranced, till I came to myself & saw with a glance at my watch how much later it was than I’d thought, & with that I rushed off down that street, with its chaos of scurrying souls — that blur of dizzying shadows — intent once again on whatever urgent errand it was that had brought me.