Today is the National Puerto Rican Day Parade. I am watching it on television in Brooklyn while the Puerto Ricans are parading up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Before I switched over to the parade, I was watching Rafael Nadal of Mallorca, Spain, win the French Open in tennis for the twelfth time in his distinguished career. Nadal is a supernatural force on clay, a slower surface that suits his unrelenting style, where he retrieves ball after ball and puts them back into his opponent’s court with incredible power and spin — until he decides he’s had enough of such foolishness and flattens out a screaming down-the-line shot to win the point, the game, the set, the match, the championship.
