Another windy day in New York, another cruddy day when the streets are almost derelict. People weren’t out and about buying clothing and jewelry and reading newspapers full of interesting stories. The remains of the Hotel Hightower almost nothing, just the shallow husk of the last 3 floors covered in ashes and burnt coaches. People gathered around Hightower Square, the area around the Hotel Hightower with bushes and a grandiose water fountain. Now, it was covered in rubbish.

        People stared in awe at the disaster, Alan didn’t want to remind himself of it. Alan was once again on the streets waiting to shine shoes. He had a job interview later that afternoon at a factory that produced glass bottles for milkman and busy housewives. The skeleton of the hotel was charred, and seeming like it could blow over any second.

        Alan left Hightower Square and head off to the train station where he took the job as a shoe shiner. Alan walked into the wind, like a salmon flowing upstream, until he reached a bench to sit in. The view of downtown New York was covered in an eerie gray fog as another man with a bushy white beard sat inside the train station.

        This man, was Herman Shearer, another poor man with no apparent future in sight. He carried a large black leather suitcase with a piece of loose paper hanging out. Herman waited for his train in the packed station but decided to wait outside where it was less crowded. He stepped outside, and the wind howled in his ears.

        Herman slipped on a puddle of water and got his nice brown suit all mucky. As he slipped, the loose piece of paper flew out of the briefcase, and around the station to where Alan was getting up from the bench.

        As Alan got off the bench, the piece of paper flew right into his face while he struggled to straighten his dirty suit. He caught the paper, and in surprise, started to read it.

        ‘What is this?’ thought Alan, “Poetry? It is poetry, what are the chances? Dang, it’s good too. Who wrote this? There doesn’t seem to be a name here. I have a pen on me, maybe I should just write my name on it. What harm can it do?’

        Alan folded the poem into a wad and forced it into his small pockets. he then went inside the train station to catch a train to his job interview in Edison, New Jersey.

        The train was tight and compact with people of all shapes and sizes crammed into this small train. Alan managed to snag a wooden seat not too far away from the train door. He read through the poem again and again, admiring the beauty of every paragraph and sentence. The poem described the beauty of the wooden trails and beaten paths of nature, something that Alan had never seen.

        Alan had never been in any other nature than Central Park, a good mile from the apartment, but he always dreamed of venturing far into the beauty of nature and maybe a quick stop in Niagara Falls. The picturesque mountains of the Rockies always swayed him through grainy old pictures of gray mountains poking out of the ground.

        Alan put the poem with a confident feeling about it in his pocket. Something made him hopeful for the future and what it held, and as the train came to a halt at another station, Alan looked out the window at the world surrounding him.