At long last, I was so late for a thing that I actually just stopped and took the photo I’ve wanted to get for years, but never made the time for.

In one sense my timing was as terrible as ever, with me powerless to make up for the way it again took longer than I had imagined to leave the house. But my timing was also spectacular, since I rode up—some thirty-five minutes past the time I ought to have been passing through here—just as this pink-tinged late-day luster flashed its high beams. And to have my camera with me on this of all days! I see how running late isn’t always a bad thing.

Five-thirty in the afternoon in mid-to-late October turns out to be the perfect time to contemplate the Palace of Culture, that contentious beacon of our nation’s past, especially from a vantage point in the middle of the road near the western terminus of Złota, a quaint-but-gritty street with a lovely name. Our city’s Stalinist crown jewel reveals itself as divisible, after all—precisely, unequally, and non-rectilinearly so, into one section bathed in the warm radiance of the setting sun and a much larger one darkened by the arc-edged shadow of this deconstructivist Liebeskind highrise.

I’m increasingly impressed by this city of mine. And increasingly able to talk openly about my inability to dependably plan my arrival times.

Photo taken with the Fujifilm X-T5 and the Fujinon XF 35mm f/1.4 fast prime set to f 5.6 and hand-held at 1/70 sec.