From the Recesses – Everything Was White

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Earlier this morning, my mother sent me a note through the interwebs. She said that the East Coast was in a deep freeze and that New York City was bracing for a monster snowstorm that might drop up to two feet around the Metro Area. I was telling a friend about the email and the impending storm as we were walking across town on our way to a meeting. We were running late, and, since I’m a New Yorker (and therefore genetically inclined to fast-walking even while holding hands on strolls through the park) I was practically at a jog. Being oblivious of so much in life, I was surprised when Ingi grabbed my wrist and indicated without words, “Hey, you’re walking too fast. Slow down!” She was right, of course. Who’s ever on time for a meeting down here anyway?

Charging around town like I’ve got a million things to do is the one part of my New York character that has been most resistant to change. But, intentionally, I slowed my stride and started talking again about the storm bearing down on New York and, for the first time in a long time, actually wishing I was up there. In general, I’ll take the 75 and sunny of Antigua six months a year. But there is something magical about a snowstorm, a storm so powerful, and so delicate, that it can take an entire city by the wrist and, without saying a word, convince it to slow down. And those days are important, because it’s tough to see the magic that’s everywhere around you if you’re constantly flying by at Mach 2.

Einstein said it better; at least he did according to the bulletin board Ms. Alvarez from the math department posted outside her classroom back when we were colleagues in Brooklyn. It read:

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Damn straight, Al, and anything that reminds us of that wisdom has a very special value. And snowstorms have a way of showing us the magic of it all.

After our meeting, as we were walking, more slowly, back across town, I found myself still lost in whited-out memories and I began telling Ingi about the last great snowstorm of the 20th century and how (as could only happen on such a day) I ended up sitting in a dark bar with a few old friends, listening to a leather-clad dominatrix sing a jazz improvisation off a 9th century Persian poem while sipping Irish Whiskey.

What can I tell ya? It was one hell of a storm.

In February of 1996 an enormous, cyclonic blizzard (a “crab-nebula of a storm,” wrote the New York Times) blew up the coast from the Caribbean where it met a wall of frozen air straight from the Arctic. The resulting cloud bank which stretched 1200 miles, from Maine to North Carolina, was 500 miles wide and, almost unheard of with winter storms, actually developed an eye, like a hurricane. By the time it had passed La Gran Manzana, 26.9 inches of snow had fallen in Central Park, the most since they started keeping records back in 1869. At the storm’s peak, over a foot of snow fell in under three hours and the skies lit up all night with silent flashes of high altitude lightning. If a band of ancient people were to have experienced it, virgins assuredly would have been sacrificed to appease the angered Gods of Winter. To the jaded romantics of The City nearing the end of the millennium, it seemed like a far more humanistic God maybe just wanted to remind his hipster children that he still had the keys to the magic store and the legerdemain to blow our minds with one of his simplest tricks, the ice crystal. Watch my hands.

When the snow started to fall, I was sitting at Flannery’s Pub on 14th and 7th with my friend, John Moynihan. The newsmen had said to expect some weather, but no one was talking about any meaningful accumulation, so we weren’t paying it much mind. As such, the storm slipped in stealthily. That, I’ve come to believe, is one of the first signs of a truly beautiful storm – it somehow arrives before it’s there. Before you know it, it’s slipped in your backdoor and is sitting at the table next to you. When you do finally see it, when you first notice the rate of accumulation and the strength of the storm itself, there’s a moment of hope – real, honest to Einstein hope. I’m sure it’s biological. The mind quiets down, the heart opens, and the possibility of a purpose in this life reasserts itself in even the bitterest amongst us. I’ve become more of a cynic in recent years, but still well remember the fervent prayers of an innocent childhood offered to the heavens from a frosted bedroom window on those nights when the snows began to fall.  In rapture and sincerity I prayed, as I’m sure you did, too, for once to a God we actually believed in, “Please, God, please…Let this one be real… Don’t stop snowing all night long. Please please please please please let the snows cover it all… and give us a snow day. Amen. Please.”

Instinctively, as he looked out the wall-high windows at the front of the bar and saw the storm’s force, Fergel the Barman’s jaw dropped. John and I saw his face and turned around to look out at the street scene, too. This one was real and it had us by the wrist. The city was wearing white.

When we pulled up stumps at the bar and headed home for the night there was half a foot on the ground and no sign yet of the plows. A few hours later I peeled my ears open just long enough to hear Howard Stern, himself, tell me that it was fine to go back to dreamland. There were 16 inches out there and the city was frozen to still-life.

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