Saturday

We woke up late, ate a light breakfast of fruit - Krissa making a delicate meal of half a cantaloupe melon, me fighting with a grapefruit - and we gathered our things for tennis.

We wandered out onto the courts in the breeze and the sunshine and played for a little over an hour, not playing for points, just knocking balls about, having fun, laughing, running for errant balls before they bounced into serious people's games.

We stopped when we were tired enough and sat on the bench next to our empty court, watching the other players. Balls shot back and forth on all the courts, irregularly, but with a short, effortless rhythm, like complex clockwork filled with all the sounds of the coming summer.

We walked back to our apartment from Astoria Park, and we went out again almost immediately, buying bagels and coffee and sitting in the square while old ladies gossiped across concrete chess tables with their shopping trollies parked around them, and skateboarders rattled across the tiles and leapt and skidded past the Greek statuary under the shade of the trees.

We picked up our laundry, came home again and abandoned our plans for the Museum of Natural History, and packed a bag with books, the New York Times, a blanket and some fruit, and headed for the park by the river. The wind had picked up, but we laid the blanket out on the gently sloping grass and started to read. We half watched the wedding party posing for photographs in front of the river and the bridges between the passing oily barges, the tugs nudging and towing them past the waterfront. We ate apples, took silly pictures, kissed, watched a black dog cracking a broken white frisbee.

We finally decided that we were cold, and decided to come home for a pot of tea before going out for the evening's meal. The shadows were long on the streets of Astoria, but we always crossed to the sunny sides of the streets.

Coming back onto the street where we live, we spotted an air conditioning unit next to a tree with the note, 'This works, please take - free' sellotaped onto the front.

This sort of thing isn't unheard of in New York. If you've got something cumbersome like a desk or a table and you want to get rid of it, you could try and sell it, but it's far easier to just cart it out onto the street and wait.

Anyway, behind the air conditioner was a 20" television with a built-in VCR...with an identical note.

I'm not kidding, I'm not lying, I'm not making this up.

We have just enjoyed a practically perfect Saturday afternoon, and we got a free television.