Today New York City experienced its first significant snowstorm. What was hoped for (by those of us less friendly towards winter’s powdery fun and games) was possibly a few flakes quickly turning over to rainfall and, just as quickly, to clearing skies. Alas, this wasn’t the case and we received about 6-inches of the white stuff. “Was that all?,” you ask, especially you residents of Buffalo, New York and Cleveland, Ohio and similar cities famous for their snowbound winters. Yes, that was all; but in this town it’s enough.
In a city where a car with a flat tire could back up traffic for ten miles, a trash pail fire become a major spectacle of fire trucks and closed-off streets, (probably even someone slipping on a banana peel shutting down half the city down), six-inches of snow is indeed a lot of snow…it follows, of course, that blizzards are the closest NYC comes to the end of the world. But these are the ups and downs of any metropolis (especially this one): the crowded steel/concrete unreality lies at the hilarious mercy of nature’s whims.
Of course, I had to join that deliriously broken throng of happy people shoveling snow and ice off their respective sidewalks, cars, walkways and other paths of ingress and egress. Risking sprains and strains, with accompanying moans and groans, my exhausted neighbors were busily at work with their shovels. That metallic slushy-scraping sound, at monotonous intervals, reverberated in the air and carried on the stoic wind as patches of this and stretches of that were cleared away. It’s at times like this that I appreciate not being a homeowner and that my only snow clearance project is my car (luckily it was parked beneath a giant, spreading chestnut tree…or some sort of tree) and had little snow upon it.
When I briskly finished that sweet task and came back into my cozy apartment, the inevitable weather reports were inevitably playing-up this current snowstorm as if all of New York City would be sadly paralyzed for hours…maybe days to come. There the stock character aka on-the-scene reporter was, bundled-up to the whiskers, excitedly describing the fact of a few inches of snow as if it were in truth a few feet; emphasizing his account by choosing some isolated wind-driven heap of snow as indicative of the storm’s severity. This was followed by reports of traffic jams, subway delays, minor accidents,…as I downed my third cup of coffee, I said to myself: This is the same snowstorm we get everyday in New York City…so often we’re actually starting to believe in it.
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