"Summer afternoon...summer afternoon…

...to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language." So said Henry James (or possibly Henry David Thoreau--one of the Henrys)(looked it up—it's James—also discovered that about fifty billion other people have used it as the title of a blog post—oh well).

Chicago, five o’clock on a Saturday: the sun had sunk low enough that, while the east side of the street was still baking in brilliant light, the west side was in shadow. The sunlight slanted between the buildings, glowing warmly in greenery and dazzling me as I passed each opening; in the shade of their houses, people had come out to putter in their front gardens or sit on their stoops with beer and dogs.

An elderly Taiwanese woman pulled irritably at tomato vines thick with ripening fruit; her deeply lined face appeared focused and perplexed as though attempting to solve a problem. A few doors down, a balding man at the top of his front steps was reading the paper, with an enormous, alert German shepherd seated on either side; the dogs looked at me searchingly as I walked past, and the man gave me a mild hello.

Out on the main street the light was almost blinding and my eyes were filled up with what seemed to be women everywhere, their smooth rounded flesh half-undressed in the heat—floaty gauze grazing calves, strappy straps digging into bare backs, hair plastered against curving necks. Saturday afternoon promenade, with big sunglasses and cell phones; the usual purposeful pace of the city is reduced to a lazy saunter in the heavy heat.

As I waited for my iced coffee, I watched a police van pull up in front of the 7-11 across the street; the thick-vested, heavily armed cops took turns going inside. One got a Big Gulp; the other emerged with a Smart Water and something else I couldn’t see, which he mixed in a plastic container, shaking vigorously.

All very ordinary, unremarkable, summer afternoon details, but somehow the brilliant golden light seemed to etch each in my memory. Cloth clinging to skin in the sticky heat, pursed mouths sucking icy drinks, dogs straining at leashes as flip-flopped feet struggled for traction, bare flesh flecked with sweat.

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon... James's "beautiful" is too weak an adjective.

The words are redolent with echoes of childhood delights and reverberations of grown-up pleasures. They conjure a tactile voluptuousness, a sleepy sensuality, a familiar and delicious torpor.

Either that or I’ve been getting laid so much I can’t think straight.