The days, busy with their tree-lined streets, are sadly more than enough for many despite their claustrophobic underpinnings and the worried look on the faces of billboards: the retired academic with his early bird specialty; the Wittgenstein scholar and his prim partner clutching her handbag and Old World dictionary, yellowed and dog-eared, huddled with their hound on a flowered windowseat overlooking the local acquifer overgrown and struggling for recognition. Woe to those befuddled crossword puzzlers or those courting constellations on rooftops with the satisfaction of a meandering brook. Switch-hitting is long dead. The words not spoken continue to say it all: the unsolved math problems, the crumbling fruit stands, the forgotten air pumps hissing at the encroaching rust.
