The last days of summer. The first days of autumn. We walk the streets we know and yell after the kids who run ahead of us. Central Park is a cake of rock and grass. The ponds ripple with turtles. Little Italy dances for us with pasta and sweets and the boys will ask when we get back home how can we make cannolis.

But it’s in Washington Square park, under a cloud dotted sky, listening to a Chopin piece being played by a shirtless, barefoot man on an upright piano (that has — by some act of insanity — been wheeled out into the freedom of sunlight) that I feel at home. My kids eat their rainbow snow cones and my wife smiles and leans her head back with a deep sigh: It’s worth every minute I’ve lived to get me here.