In Tribeca Park, on the corner of Walker Street and Church. It’s a windy day, and the low-angled winter sun is bearing down on the eastern side of the park where I’m sitting. The park is normally a popular lunch spot for office workers in the area, but because of the cold it’s completely empty. I have some time to kill, but it’s too windy to read, and the glare of the sun makes my phone screen hard to see; so I settle in to watch the pedestrian traffic passing by the park. After ten minutes or so a family enters from Walker Street – a man and woman (the man in the lead), followed by two children. Both the parents are smoking from vaping pipes, the large metallic kind, and each of them exhale huge columns of smoke (blown straight backward by the strong wind). The kids meanwhile, a boy of around ten and a girl of seven or eight, bounce around behind them, chasing and teasing each other. At one point the girl puts her hand on her mouth and then flicks it toward the boy – a gesture that could signify something obscene in another culture. But could it here, I wonder, in this context, refer to the vaping activity of the parents? Is the girl ‘blowing smoke’ on the boy? The notion seems absurd on its face, and yet: vaping is obviously a regular activity of the parents, would it be that surprising if the kids incorporated it into their game playing? The parents march on, paying the children little mind, and the group exits the other end of the park and heads north on Church Street.