Sleepytime Stories

At 9pm on most days I am likely to be eyeing the finish line of a long day - long, alas, usually in hours, not on things achieved. Make it 9pm on a frigid February weeknight in New York, and that likelihood turns into a certainty. And yet, there I was just yesterday, out in the West Village of Manhattan, my bedtime a distant prospect, bundled up against the arctic wind, trying to make sense of a crudely hand-drawn map.