The uncultivated odd
Frank Viola, Leader in Sport of Racing Pigeons, Dies at 87 – New York Times:
Today, pigeon racing is mostly an old man’s game. In the postwar years, there were scores of racing clubs in the greater New York area; perhaps a dozen survive. But even now, on certain fine Saturdays and Sundays, one can see men tautly poised on the city’s rooftops, scanning the sky for a few distant specks winging home.
I liked that last sentence a lot; it put me in mind of Joseph Mitchell. That New York City – the NYC of the mundane, the quirky, the unself-conscious eccentric – seems lost forever.