So, is everyone in New York freaking out about being on Orange Alert?” a friend from England asked me this week. “No, no,” I replied. “We’re all frolicking in the snow.”
So what if we’ve actually spent most of the week clambering over great piles of slush – I’m still buzzing from the excitement of Monday’s big storm.
It was one of those awe-inspiring New York days when you feel that everyone you pass in the street is your friend and that the entire city pulls together.
If I ever move back to England, memories of these “big days” – some of which came from tragedy, some from more frivolous events, some from Mother Nature – will be what I’ll think of most.
On Monday, it wasn’t simply that everyone was thinking and talking about the weather. It was that after so many weeks of angst, it seemed that we all suddenly remembered how to have fun again.
And even though the Orange Alert was based on false information, the city desperately needed something to bury talk of war and chemical attacks. The snowstorm did the job nicely.
For me it began at 1 a.m. Monday morning, when I took a walk with a friend who was heading home from my apartment. By that time, Hudson Street was already blanketed with sparkling snowdrifts, so we picked up her dog and roamed the West Village.
All around in the swirling flakes were other late-night dog walkers and people just checking out the storm and sharing in the magical hour.
A couple was pelting each other with snowballs on Leroy Street. We persuaded a man with a black Labrador to leap into the middle of Barrow Street and make a snow angel. One dog walker had a flask of Irish coffee and some styrofoam cups. Other people came out of bars and began whooping and sliding in the streets.
Later Monday afternoon, I ended up at French Roast on Sixth Avenue with a couple of friends. It was like being in one great big apres-ski bar.
Everyone was sipping hot chocolate or red wine and stopping at each other’s tables to swap snow stories. Outside, a couple went by on skis and everyone pointed. Later I saw a guy on a snowboard being pulled along by an SUV.
My roommate, Claire, summed it up: “Thank God for the snow. It’s stopped everyone from talking about the war.”
Meanwhile my other roommate, Alice, was on the date of her life. She had finally arranged to go out with a guy she’d met at a party two weeks earlier. They went to a movie matinee and then walked home hand-in-hand through SoHo’s winter wonderland.
“Nothing could have been more romantic,” she gushed later. “It was like being in an old black-and-white movie.”
Later, I walked home late from a movie through a white, almost empty Times Square – where people cordially shared cabs downtown and helped each other cross the road.
It reminded me of other big New York days, when, through horror or happiness, the city came together in ways I’ve never experienced any place else.
When I first arrived here 2½ years ago, the city was in the thrall of the Subway Series. I lived in the East Village then, and loved to see the same game playing at every bar and on the TV sets people had brought out on to the street. It was my first experience of the city living and breathing in unison.
But then, on Sept. 11, I walked through an almost deserted Times Square very late after finishing work. Every person I passed asked me if I was OK. The city was in shock, but it had already rallied.
The Friday after Sept. 11, I met friends in the West Village. They’d spent the week on the West Side highway cheering on rescue workers. The evening was warm, and we sat outside Les Deux Gamins in Sheridan Square drinking red wine too quickly.
Everyone, it seemed, started smoking again. Every stranger and passer-by stopped to talk, commiserate and swap stories with us. Everyone was intent on cheering each other up. Strangely, for a place that is so utterly diverse and discordant in so many ways, there is nowhere like New York for creating that sense of togetherness.
It may be hectic and unforgiving much of the time, but when drama strikes, it becomes a village.
And that’s what I tell people when they ask me what it’s like living in such a potentially dangerous place, where the possibility of terrorism constantly looms.
New Yorkers may be resigned to the threat of the unknown and living with anxiety. But if something big happens, good or bad, there’s no other city where I’d rather be.