end-of-strike haiku

o mighty F train
pulling smoothly to my stop
joy to the platform.

strike!

The mass transit workers of New York have walked off the job for the first time since dinosaurs roamed the earth. Well, actually it was 1980; close enough. I can't help wondering why, after all those years I did not live in New York, I had to come back just in time for a transit strike.

But it's not all about me. What about the other 8 million people trying to get to work? What about the transit workers and their demands? I have to confess, I am rather exasperated with both sides. I would like to go (but how would I get there??) to the Grand Hyatt in Midtown, where the Transit Workers Union and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are negotiating (or were -- are they even talking to each other now?) and knock some heads together. The MTA, faced with an unexpected, one-time, $1 billion surplus, should not have used that money to give fare discounts to riders. They should have divided it up among the 33,700 transit workers. At $29,000 each, that would have been a very handsome Christmas present and would have put everyone in a much better humor. Even if the workers had to share it with their comrades working on MetroNorth and the Long Island Railroad (also part of the MTA but not on strike, thank god) it still would have been a pretty nice bonus.

The transit workers should wake up and realize that no one in this day and age should expect to retire at age 55 and contribute little or nothing to their own pension and health care costs. Sorry! I know it's not easy to be a transit worker, but we are talking about economic and demographic forces larger than any of us.

But what is it like, my readers out in the heartland (all two of them) might be wondering? What is it like in New York with the trains not running? I can't tell you very much right now because it is my day off and I am at home in Cobble Hill. There is a strange, drowsy stillness in the streets for the most part; there are clearly not as many people around as usual. But on Smith Street, the nearest street to me that leads to the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridge entrances, it was gridlock at 11 a.m. as far as the eye could see. A weird contrast with the serenity elsewhere. Nothing else seems unusual: the shops are open, people are walking their dogs, talking on cell phones, buying Christmas trees. It is cold but sunny, a beautiful winter day -- a fine day to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn, which lots of people apparently were doing, to judge from the pictures at nytimes.com. Tomorrow, that is where I will be, too.

Denver Geographic

People look different here. There's a little person at the girls' school -- boy? girl? I couldn't tell you -- who looks so French, with bushy curly black hair and striking blue eyes. He/she always wears black turtlenecks. He/she could be a male/female model one day.
I guess that says something, too. In my former Mom-and-apple-pie town, girls wore pink and boys had clothes with trucks on them. No ambiguity there, no beguiling androgyny at school. It stands to reason that people here WOULD look different -- there's more of a cosmopolitan mix here than the relative Scotch-Irish homogeneity of NC -- but still, it never fails to surprise me. Also, it's because people here dress differently and have different attitudes. For example, in Smithfield it never really bothered me that December holiday discussions were Christmas-centric. After all, it was a small Southern town in the largest tobacco-growing county in the nation. If you were to bet that nobody in the class was celebrating Hanukkah or Ramadan or Diwali, you would win that bet. The teachers talked about Christmas around the world, and there would be a brief state-mandated bone thrown to Hanukkah, but that was about it. Here, you just can't get away with that. This must be one of Bill O'Reilly's least favorite cities in the world.

We have a large international community too. There's a large Ethiopian community, and every once in a while you see beautiful people who have recently arrived in the country, still in traditional African dress. They are usually tall and thin with round saucer eyes and flat cheekbones and small mouths, who speak mellifluous and (to me) inscrutable Amharic to each other. Usually they're in Target with a relative, being shown how to Americanize themselves. I wish I could speak Amharic so I could tell them we have enough Americans already, and not nearly enough Ethiopians.
We also have a high Bosnian refugee population here; and I find that I can frequently pick the Bosnians out. They have distinctive, narrow-set eyes with long noses and, frequently, wide-set chins. (Or: They have large, wide eyes, and everything else is the same.) They are usually big-boned; and they are all, in my experience, extraordinarily pleasant. I have made friends with a Bosnian woman, and I would love to ask her about her homeland and the war, but I'm afraid to. How do you broach that in conversation?
Apparently, there are Hungarians too. I live a block away from Hungarian Freedom Park, in which a large statue commemorates the Hungarian Uprising of 1969. Candles are frequently lit at its base.

*I can't believe I am extolling the cosmopolitan virtues of Denver, which is a wee burg next to Brooklyn. Kathleen, please don't be insulted.

A 100 Percent Chance of Snow

Last Thursday, reading the online weather information, I learned that there was a 100 percent chance of snow in the New York City area for the following day. I kept staring at the number in bemusement. I had spent so many winters in North Carolina, where snow was much more a notion than an actual event. It was always talked about in the conditional tense; the stars and the atmospheric conditions had to line up just right to get even a flake of snow. To have snowfall -- and 6 to 10 inches of it, moreover, which could paralyze North Carolina for days! -- confidentally predicted with 100 percent certitude seemed an arrogance bordering on hubris. It made me realize, more than anything had for a while, what a different sort of place I was now living in.
Not only that, but the world was going on as usual. No one was rushing out of work early to buy milk and bread. A colleague at the next desk called a friend and said he guessed he wouldn't be coming to the poker game in New Jersey on Friday, but he seemed slightly embarassed to let a little thing like 10 inches of snow interfere with a completely unnecessary 30-mile drive.
On Friday, it snowed, as promised. Fat flakes falling out of the dark sky turned Brooklyn temporarily peaceful and blanketed with perhaps 6 inches of snow. Later it turned to rain for a while and then the sun came out. Before we knew it, the snow had vanished like a dream. The world went on as usual.

Afternoon delight

I am jealous of Kathleen and her Nepalese hat. There's a Nepalese import store about fifteen blocks up, and I've been toying with stopping in and getting one. My daughters have them (alas, theirs are the sweatshop Target variety).

Kathleen wins the extreme weather award today. Here it is nice again, cool but not bitterly so, the land that Old Man Winter briefly forgot. On Wednesday, we didn't even make it up to the projected Lucky Seven. Two, I think was the high. One, two. Count 'em.
By Sunday, it will be 50. Where (and when) else can you have a 50-degree temperature swing in the span of four days and not question all that is right and normal? If in New York it was 30 degrees on Wednesday and 80 by Sunday, wouldn't screaming people wearing homemade placards be handing out Bibles on street corners?

On that cold, cold Wednesday, I rediscovered an innocent childhood delight. I walked across an unshoveled parking lot to my car and, as I always do, I thought I should probably walk in my existing footsteps or in tire tracks. Walking on a white sheet of snow seems, I don't know, wasteful or inappropriate somehow. But instead I said, "Damn it all," and I marched around and jumped and felt the crisp, untrammeled snow give gently under my feet. Anonymous sources report that I actually said, "Whee," but I'll never cop to it.

Deja vu

In New York today it is 32 and cloudy. Dark. Brooklyn today reminds me of Bruges; I was there in late October of 2002 and it was gloomy like this, yet beautiful. Winds are reported to be 10 m.p.h., but that seems rather low, especially in Midtown where I was earlier today. But they were nothing like 100 m.p.h. Robin wins the extreme weather award. There was a reason some of those settlers got discouraged and headed back East, like Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame, who ended up in Arkansas, I think, where she never faced showers of grasshoppers and blizzards that went on for days at a time.

I have a very warm coat puffy with down and as of today, a warm, goofy-looking knitted hat from Nepal with ear flaps and a soft fleece lining that makes me smile whenever I put it on. And oddly enough, I am loving winter. It's like returning to a land I had almost forgotten. This feeling of having been here before, a long time ago, the way I know the turns in the road to my childhood home in Connecticut in the dark. Somthing older than anything, older than language and memory.

Winter would come to North Carolina once in a while, most notably the time in 2000 when we got nearly 2 feet of snow and the area was paralyzed for days. And it always reminded me of something! It seemed like childhood, or "Dr. Zhivago," or something more primordial. Winter. Riding home on the subway around midnight the other night, half-asleep, everyone in their winter gear, I remembered the dream I used to have in childhood, of a journey in the snow.Dark, mysterious, the wolves howling in the distance, the snow falling. And it seemed like I had already been here, at least once before.

Blow, blow thou winter wind: A Special Report

I thought we were done with hurricanes. Silly goose, me. Yesterday we had gusts up to 100 miles per hour! At 20 degrees for a high, add high winds and, well, it's really, really cold.

Today, it's snowing again and still windy, although not nearly as much so as yesterday. In the city, we'll have about five inches of snow before we're done; and we'll end the day and begin tomorrow below zero. Tomorrow, we'll make it up all the way to seven degrees.

So far I am maintaining my humor, even as I stare at my $212 heating bill for last month. Sigh.

Nope, no sheep here

They say you can find everything in New York, but I have not found any sheep, bighorn or otherwise. Perhaps I just haven't looked hard enough. Perhaps they are hiding in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Or grazing on Sheep Meadow in Central Park, visible only to the pure of heart.
It snowed here yesterday for the first time, with very little warning. We woke up Sunday morning to find the world had turned white. By midday it was already slushy and melting, turning gray and brown in the streets and sidewalks. The sky was grey. The buildings were brown and gray. A symphony of urban neutrals, in short. The Christmas tree vendors, who have sprouted up on the sidewalks like magic, provided the only spot of color and life. They were shaking the snow off their unfurled trees (many of the trees are wrapped in net and folded up like umbrellas for easier transport) sending waves of evergreen scent into the cool damp air, carrying a faint memory of the place they came from. I thought of the Christmas tree farms you can see in the mountains of North Carolina, the perfectly spaced trees marching in rows up the steep slopes. Destined, perhaps, for a street corner in Brooklyn.

Something you don't see in NYC

Today we decided, even though it was 10 degrees out (no joke), to drive into the higher elevations and see the snow. It was unlike city snow -- not slushy and dark, but pristine and shimmering; and on the way back, it covered the plains "like it was sleeping under a white blanket," as my oldest daughter said, with the white meeting a sky pale as if washed in powder.

In the midst of all this beauty, we had to stop the car for a herd of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep that had descended on the road. There were seven or eight actually on the frozen blacktop, with probably twenty-five more flanking each side. They were licking the road, perhaps, we thought, looking for the salt that had been laid by the DMV crews. They were so cute! Since they're an endangered species, we figured we'd probably get in a lot of trouble if we tried to take one home, not that it would go willingly. But can you imagine, a bighorn sheep as a pet!

Crystalline chill

What Denver needs, I have decided, is Anna Wintour*. Someone needs to shake this cowtown and tell it not to wear white after Labor Day.

In other words, yes, it's snowing again here. And where heat is bad, cold is worse. Its tiny tines poke me everywhere, damn the layers and heavy coats and three pairs of socks. I curse my sensitivity to cold as well as my apparent inability to keep a pair of gloves for more than a couple of months. I'm worse than the children on that score.

There are things I like about the snow: the faultless, ghostly drape stretched across the horizon; its eerie, tinkly sound as it falls; the renewing romance of it, the feeling that everything somehow will be clean underneath (even though, of course, nothing could be farther from the truth). Snow is best enjoyed from inside, behind a window, under a blanket and with a cup of coffee or tea.

As far as Kathleen's post goes, I'm so glad she feels at home in New York. I knew she would. Maybe I just left too much behind, or, as I've said before, maybe I just haven't found my "home" yet. Funny enough, even though we were there for a few days, I really liked Austin, Texas. I liked the people and the places and the outrageous, grandiose, constantly slightly hilarious Texasness of it all. Good music, good beer, Molly Ivins, Willie Nelson, Kinky Friedman and bats: Austin had it all. Ah, maybe one day.

*Here in Denver, we do have our own version of Anna Wintour in Brandi Shigley, but she snowboards, and I'm pretty sure she would throw any and all arbitrary fashion edicts out the window of her Capitol Hill flat.