I can’t speak for anyone else in the city, but I really don’t pay much attention to dire snowstorm warnings. First of all, the local news has a way of blow-dry-who-cried-wolfing the most average potential snowfall up into an apocalyptic scenario, all “snow on the way, how it affects your commute and your stockpile of batteries and bottled water, zombies, locusts, FILM! AT! ELEVEN!” and the weather guy is standing in front of the radar map, smiling in an absently “reassuring” way that suggests a strong but politely worded need to urinate and mentally re-indexing every “white” pun he learned at the Weatherman Academy in order to get the most out of his big moment, but then, if you hit pause on the DVR, the accumulation predicted for the city is one to three inches. And when more like six to eight inches is predicted, one to three is what generally ends up falling anyway. And and: everything is a nor’easter to the local weather teams. I didn’t grow up in the city proper, but I grew up with the same stations, and after twenty years of hearing Sam Champion inflate every light drizzle that passes through Bergen County into a Bachman-novella scenario, it’s going to stop registering at some point. A point like “the early nineties.”

Second of all, I don’t have to care that much about snow of any kind unless I’ve got travel plans…which, when it’s snowing, I often seem to, and often with the Couch Baron. In fact, I IMed him yesterday afternoon to make sure the two of us weren’t supposed to be crammed into the twenty-first row of a plane somewhere (“Stop playing paper!” “Well, you stop playing rock!” “You stop!” “You!”), instead of sacked out on the couch watching AMC. The last blizzard of the same size, the Blizzard of ’96, marooned me in Dallas, staring glumly at footage of everyone in Newark Airport braiding one another’s hair for two days, until the Port Authority finally started letting planes in, but I got to spend this one at home. I don’t have a car I have to dig out or try to drive anywhere; my commute is twenty feet, and I can do it in socks.

So, people kept checking in yesterday, to see if I’d…I don’t know what. Frozen to death, I guess, or gotten Cheneyed with rock salt. But I had a pretty average Sunday, really — did some yoga; put up a recap; watched the cats watching the birds on the fire escape. Okay, that last part isn’t really average, because the cats spent much of the day on the windowsill, in shifts, doing the pre-pounce butt wiggle and “threatening” ear chevron in the direction of the birds who had improbably chosen to hang out on my bird feeder, teeny drifts of snow in their crests, snacking on seed-sicles. Other birds found a little leeward shelter under a flower pot and lined up there, out of the wind, and judging by the insistently snacky reh rrrrreh reh reh reh-eh-eh-eh-eh rrrrreh sounds Little Joe kept making, I just know he could have caught one of the birds if I’d only opened the window and let him unleash his fat-fu on the avian social club.

Well, except for the part where he’s quite plump, and also the part where birds can fly and he can’t, and also the part where he’d put one little grey paw in the snow, sink in up to his chest, and start howling for help, and I’d have to pluck him out (if by “pluck” you mean “drag, or haul, with the help of some sort of fulcrum-related device”) and try to dry him off while he’s all bitey, and then he would decide that the entire debacle is my fault, and therefore he has the right to nap damply and sheddily on my lone cashmere sweater, and this, boys and girls, is why God gave cats thumbs initially but then changed his mind.

I left them to their fantasies to go out to lunch. I love going out into the city in a heavy snow; I have a theory that New York isn’t so much a big town as a big group of small towns crammed tightly together, and usually the “crammed tightly together” is what you see, not the small-town-ness. But when it snows, every block is Mayberry. Going up the hill and coming back down, I saw a total of eight cars — and, improbably, one bus, about which I also IMed the Couch Baron, because we both have this complicated relationship with the B63. It’s that The Taming of the Chipster non-relationship relationship you had in college with that guy with the hat, with the screaming and the furtive hook-ups, like, in a tree behind his fraternity, and the postmortem brunches with your friends all “he’s just scared of his feelings for you,” blah blah cheap beer blah, except in transit form, because in theory, the B63 takes me and the Couch Baron pretty much from door to door of our respective apartments, so initially, we dubbed it “the Boyfriend Bus,” because it’s so handy, it’s our boyfriend, we love it!

But in practice, oh, the shame: it’s always going by three in a row in the opposite direction, or running on Fourth instead of Fifth for no discernible reason and with no audible announcement, or not even stopping but just ejecting passengers on the fly while we chase it all “stop argh HATE!” so now it’s the Ex-Boyfriend Bus, or the Friends With Benefits Except We’re Not Really Even Friends And I Think He Has A Drinking Problem Bus, or “…BUS-HOLE!” Like, we have had entire conversations — most of them, it’s worth noting, while walking down Fifth in the same direction as the bus to pass the time until one shows up, which it doesn’t ever do until we only have two blocks left to go anyway — about how we would accuse the bus of fucking with our heads if we thought it cared, but it obviously doesn’t, what is wrong with us that it treats us this way?! FINE! WE DON’T CARE ANYMORE! WE’LL JUST TAKE A CAR SERVICE, THEN, BECAUSE WE’VE HAD IT, SO THERE. …Oh, hi, B63. Yeah, let me just…my Metrocard? So…how are you? New…hat?

So, naturally, what is the only vehicle operating for five blocks in either direction, not counting older-sister-powered plastic sleds? The B63. BUS-WAD!

I didn’t let it get me down, though. With almost no cars on the streets, the kids in the neighborhood availed themselves of the slope in “Park Slope” to sled straight down the middle of the streets, and the kids who weren’t sledding were bucket-brigading pots of hot water out of their apartments to help with the packing of snow-fort walls (I did hear a parent, who did not look much older than I, ask if “we” were “heating all of Carroll Street. Heh). One enterprising tween was making snow angels — on the tops of the cars parked on Sixth Avenue, all of which looked like Brobdingnagian white mittens. As I chugged up Garfield, walking like a penguin to prevent landing on my ass in the street, a guy shoveling his front walk in the same style I used to adopt for clearing my parents’ driveway — an inefficient but enthusiastic let’s-get-this-over-with approach — spwoff!ed me right in the face with a shovelful of snow, felt bad, looked at me all blinking Yeti WTF?, and fell out laughing. The wind had already coated me with a good half inch all over anyway, so I really didn’t care.

At the corner of Sixth and Second Street, two guys stood in the intersection, shovels on their shoulders like muskets, like Blizzard Minutemen. They didn’t speak, just stood there, but they seemed to be communicating with each other somehow regardless, or agreeing on something. I wondered if they were shovels for hire, and I briefly considered handing them a twenty to carve me out a path to Seventh and Fourth, but even though the bell of snow on my pantlegs gave me a Jimmy Page vibe, I could walk okay. The snow wasn’t that gluey Rocky IV-workout-montage stuff, and if the dogs loved it, so could I.

And the dogs loved it. This one Pomeranian bombed past me with its little sweater all bunched up around its neck; I think its owner tried to sweater it, but it just got too excited about the snow and wriggled out before it got its legs sorted out. So cute. Elsewhere, a yellow lab was chasing flakes — and this was at around noon, when it was seventy-eight flakes per cubic inch all over Brooklyn, but the lab came to win. So cute! I felt bad for the beagle mix on Seventh, whose owner made it wear a rain poncho with the hood up and tied on. It looked so sensible and bummed, plodding along with its snow socks on. “But Mooommm!”

When I got home, I hung up all my stuff in the shower, changed into PJs, and got in bed with the cats for snow-out kung-fu theater. I didn’t love the movie — too much talking about mantis-fist style, not enough mantis-fist…ing [cough] — but sitting in bed in the afternoon with snow coming down outside, in a messy pile of blankets and magazines and cats, drinking tea and getting drowsy while Brother Chen drones on about dishonoring the Eagle’s Claw School? That, boys and girls, is why God made winter kind of rainy initially but then changed his mind.

February 13, 2006

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