Here's one of those quirky, well-written...

...articles I enjoy reading in the Times, "After Sunset, a Whole New Beach as Rockaway Gets Its Second Wind," by Corey Kilgannon, that I'm afraid most people skip over in their haste at getting to The Important Stuff. 

(First of all, "Rockaway Beach" has a particularly romantic ring to it. It's probably a beach like any other, but it sounds exotic, somehow, to my Midwestern ears.) 

Then there's this paragraph, which I found to be almost poetic: 

The beach seems to exhale after the lifeguards stand up in unison at their 6 p.m. quitting time and whistle bathers out of the water. Most beachgoers — spent, salted and sun-roasted — head for a subway, bus or car, and scrap-seeking sea gulls raid the overflowing trash cans. 

I wish I had written that.