QUOTE : Nora's walk to work was a kind of labor of love, too, of that love for the city that occasionally wavered or dimmed but had never gone away. She tended to see always the same people, the Sikh bicyclist with his two small children in a seat on the back, the man who ran while nonchalantly juggling three fluorescent green tennis balls. It was as though they all knew one another without knowing anything about one another, so that if for a week or two Tennis Ball Man did not appear Nora would find herself wondering if he was on vacation, or had moved to another neighborhood, or something worse, a broken hip , a heart attack.