TOUCH: Water balloons

At the height of an urban summer, playgrounds and public water fountains throughout the five boroughs become freckled with snippets of colored rubber, the fallout from a hot-weather city-kid game: water balloons.

Here’s the ritual. Stretch the open end of the balloon over the brass mouth of a drinking fountain, and hold it with a pinch it so it stays put. The lip of the balloon curls up against your thumb and forefinger with rippling tension. Make sure the pinching grasp is out of the way of the balloon so it doesn’t get trapped as it fills up. Press the metal button with your free hand and watch the limp balloon swell into a luminous orb, blooming from the brass fountain tip. Watch the water bubbles rising through the now-sheer rubber, the color fading from neon to pastel as it expands. Now pinch the rubber at the base of the balloon bulb, just above the fountain nozzle, and give it a few twists before releasing your other hand. Tie a stretchy knot.

Take a moment to cradle the filled water balloon in your cupped palms. Feel the cool, smooth weight, shifting as the water moves. It’s impossibly delicate, like an unhatched egg; it has an inner life of its own restless energy. Now raise it over your head… and smash it onto the ground! Or simply open your hands and let it drop. Or step on it! Or throw it to a friend—or at him. Kersploosh! Smack! An instant puddle spattered with two ends of broken balloon, now shrunken to colored glimmers. (Don’t forget to pick up the scraps.)

Another option is to arrive pre-armed, like stashing a snow fort with snowballs before a fight. Plastic shopping bags of prefilled water balloons sag from bike handlebars, or fill the upturned hem of a T-shirt like a basket.

Regardless, nothing says summer like the roughness of a gaggle of kids of all ages and background clambering around a public water fountain, the gentleness with which they fill and protect their ammunition, and the joy of a burst of water, sudden in the sun, and soon to disappear.

SIGHT: Seven Random Delights

This month, I offer a smattering of small sights around the city that make me happy every time I see them.

1. 167 Concord Street, Brooklyn

White picket fence, white “clapboard,” white birch tree; red shutters, red car, and red no standing sign: perfection.

2. Clothesline poles at sunset, Carroll Gardens

Few people use these poles—or clotheslines—anymore, but still they climb into the sky, rusty pulleys and scraps of rope still clinging to them.

3. PUSH door handle

On art deco building on Fifth Avenue in the Forties, the letters nestle so neatly.

4. Old subway-line names

On the platform at the Dekalb Avenue station in Brooklyn is an illuminated sign (which still works) listing these old names: recite them out loud and they roll off your tongue like poetry: “Fourth Avenue Brighton Sea Beach West End.”

5. “Brown”stones on St. Felix Street, Fort Greene

Colors like a box of macaroons.

6. Arrow-theme wrought-iron fencing

Complete with fletching.

7. Construction workers’ breakfast orders

Scribbled on a two-by-four scrap: “Bagel Jelly Iced Cup French Vanilla Bagel Butter” for these hardworking men.

MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE: The Franklin Avenue Shuttle

The Times Square–Grand Central Shuttle train may have two major New York City landmarks as its termini, but the lesser-known Franklin Avenue Shuttle, which cuts across Crown Heights from Franklin Avenue to the eastern edge of Prospect Park, carries local commuters and offers a brief but idyllic, train trip along its five-mile, mostly outdoor track.

I board the train on a drizzly Wednesday morning, just pass rush hour, at the Franklin Avenue station. In front of the turnstiles, a man plays slow jazz on an electric guitar. A breeze greets me at the top of the escalator, and I step off onto the outdoor platform. A wall of stained-glass windows leads from an elevator bank onto the platform and creates a dancing rainbow path as the tree branches filter light through the colored panes. Through an opening in the platform fence, I can see a row of townhouses whose rain-darkened brownstone sets their painted lintels into bright relief.

Soon I feel a quickening of the breeze and hear the hiss of wheels on wet tracks. I am pleased to see the shuttle has orange seats and a dark speckled floor, my favorite combination. As we wait, I watch through the open doors as a Verizon employee empties the quarters from a platform pay phone with a rich, heavy rattle.

The last passenger squeezes in and the train lurches into motion. Leaves of passing trees brush the windows, making wet streaks. We pass an industrial linen laundry, a girl in red on a bike moving down a rain-slicked street, a roof with a folding chair set on it, apartment buildings with windows propped open with bottles of shampoo, walls of graffiti. The wheels make the crun-a-crun sound that trains make only on outdoor tracks. We pass over one bridge and under others, through tunnels and around bends. At the final stop, Prospect Park, an MTA employee boards and mops the train, refreshing its antiseptic cinnamony smell. Every eight minutes, another ending and another beginning.

TASTE: Reben Luncheonette’s morir soñando

From the door of Reben Luncheonette, you can watch the JMZ train catch the light as it rounds the bend in the elevated tracks and soars over the East River, hissing and clacking and clanging across the Williamsburg Bridge. Beneath, traffic jostles, fruit stands spill, nail salons reek through smudged doors. But it all seems like one harmonious urban symphony, because you’re holding a morir soñando, a drink whose name means “to die dreaming.”

The morir soñando is a Dominican version of the American orange Julius, and at Reben it consists of fresh-squeezed orange juice, milk, and sweetened condensed milk blended together into a frothy shake and poured over ice. The cheerful, aproned counter staff slap it down on the counter in a fluted ice-cream-soda glass, with a straw alongside. You can wedge yourself in between the mirror and the counter (the whole place is only about twelve feet wide) or, better, sip your drink just outside the door and take in the view.

It’s creamy, sweet, milky, with a faint fizz and acidic bite. Flakes of orange pulp drift up through the straw and offer discrete tangy bursts in the syrupy sweetness. The chilling clack of ice against the teeth only adds to the flavor, as the froth from the blender limns the cubes in a lacy foam. It must be consumed right away—and then, perhaps, immediately again, like a good novel. Last time I was there I had two or three in a row.

The Reben is not shy about advertising its house drink: the awning boasts Morir Sonañdo #1” beneath the luncheonette’s name. The name glows in neon in the window. Inside, a hand-painted sign above the counter offers: Morir Sonañdo: You taste it: If you don’t like it, don’t pay, and this sign abuts a painting of a man and a woman touching foreheads, gazing into each other’s eyes, and sipping a morir soñando from twin straws. Just beneath is a row of cardboard Advil and Tylenol dispensers—in case the dream doesn’t kick in right away, I suppose.