THE NOR'EASTER PARADE

Well, here we are, just q few spare weeks away from Easter and what we get hit with is its evil twin the Nor’easter.  

This is weather Zelda Fitzgerald style.  

Just a few weeks ago it hit 70 in Comedy Central Park which obviously has a sense of humor.   Spring strip teased us with a flash of its burlesque dancer’s breast from behind her swirling feather fans and man was it ever sexy.

And now, here we are, experiencing the ultimate Deja fuck vu, when what we all crave is a lot more uv. 

The thing about New Yorkers is our ability to adapt to whatever comes our way.   We are by nature incredibly deft and defiant in the face of any inconvenience either large or small.

Now that does not mean that we don’t bitch and moan. Man do we ever.  We are mucho local vocal.  We commiserate on buses, subways, and Starbucks.  We form instant tribes, pass the vape pipe and in this case, chat up a storm.

We like to KNOW what is happening and thankfully our local TV outlets know just how to scratch that predicting itch

.We want New York 1, which to me is a sequel to the Adams Family, to tell us that a fucking-A Nuke is on the way so we can pick up our goddamn Louisville Sluggers and beat the living crap out of it when it arrives.

Our weather personalities fit our style too.  

 Listening to those shamans is the way we like our therapy: fast, direct and in our face. 

 There is nothing subtle about guys like Al Roker or Mr. G.  Mr. G could easily be a car salesman at your local Honda dealership.  He tells you, bluntly, in his best Damon Runyon style, what’s included in the package and what you are going to pay. End of story.  

He definitely graduated from The New York University of “See ya, Wouldn’t Want to Be Ya.”

On days like today, as is our style, we are either defiantly going to work or we are burrowed. deep inside our home trenches, daring the storm to take out our power, sounding exactly like Tony Danza in “Taxi.” We ain’t scared of you.  You want a piece of us?  I will punch you in your fucking face.

We also feel little like Reverend Jim, totally baffled by what the hell is happening here.

We survive here.  That is what we do.    We scam.  We deal.  We also demand excellence.  We do not suffer fools (See Election 2016).  We will tell Putin to go fuck himself right in his doughy ass face a lot faster than our current guy, the Commander and Cheat of  Washington, D. Ceive fame. 

But that doe not mean that we don’t have a soft side.  

The unofficial song of New York happens to be the theme song for Mr. Softy.  We also have Good Humor.   And street pretzels that sadly smell and taste like the business end of Dick Van Dyke’s broom in Mary Poppins.

I would like to believe that our New York Yankees, should they get the call, would come and play a few innings at the stadium.   I mean look at us.  We got Judge, Stanton, Sanchez, and Bird.  Snowball sounds very, very good to me.

Now, in reality, those guys are, at the moment,  spring training multimillionaire fat cats who are nesting in Florida and sipping Gatorade through umbrella straws, why, just like your endlessly sitting president.  Still, my fantasy is that they are all Avengers on call ready to ship out on demand.

Wakanda and New York have a lot of similarities.

We have our black stars, our deep sense of pride, super-smart women, many I’m sure who are bald.  And I will bet more than one is named Wakanda.

 Now while I will admit that Al Sharpton is not Black Panther material, I’m sure many actual, Black Panthers from the sixties, are still around our town.  They are easy to spot: they are they old black guys in the park sitting on benches with raised fists.

The song that resonates in my head is “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow,” although I have never understood the need to say that three times.   Is the first time not clear?  Was the composer a woman who felt the need to write a winter song to her boyfriend or husband who never listens?

Snow.

It also brings out the New York child in me and instantly transports me back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when the arrival of a snowstorm was considered a gift from God.  

Fact: Only God can close all the schools at the same time.

Staying at home during a weekday unveiled the true mystery that we never got to see between the hours of 8 and 3.  

Weekends were different as all the programming on TV until noon was all for us on all three networks.  It was far less stressful and demanding than our Mondays thru Fridays.  It was R and R for we the army of kids.

But being home on weekdays was a whole other animal.  The TV shows were clearly for adult eyes only.  Mom was different too.  Yes, she was all June Cleavered up just like any day (we’re talking the fifties here) but she seemed more relaxed and resilient.  Barbie had hit the Dreamhouse Motherlode and life was good.

She could lounge around and smoke her lipstick kissed filtered Viceroys and have that second cup of coffee while we PLAYED hard either outside or in.

Another thing I never got growing up, was especially in the movies when one character would try to calm down another character by having a nice cup of coffee.  Wasn’t that like totally the wrong beverage to offer a high strung person?  I mean that’s like giving Sam Nunberg a line of coke.

If we were playing outside man, did we ever build up a sweat.  We worked like Jewish day-laborers at the Pyramid construction site making snowmen and snowballs.

Throwing snowballs at moving cars was a huge Olympics worthy sport.   Forget that it was stupid and potentially life-threatening.  Somehow snow turned us all into psychopath Little Rascals who suddenly were possessed with taking out whatever car was trying to get home safely.  Not on our watch, buddy.  If you were really lucky, one of your snow bombs would go right through an open window and really nail the guy behind the wheel.  We never once thought a woman would be at the wheel.  

 Nothing beat the thrill of a totally irate snowbombed driver, leaping out his car and coming after you like a Japanese film monster.   The soundtrack was your violently beating heart, which sounded like a frantic jungle drum as you ran, slid, fell, ran, slide, fell your way to safety.

Also, we kids in Queens used to sled down a street, which was basically a steep hill that fed right into a busy Hillside Avenue.   We literally went flying right towards buses and cars but were somehow blessed with the power and ability to CUT HARD and steer our way to the safe shoulder area.

In retrospect: not an ideal thing for kids to do.  But in those days, that’s what we did.  We did not live in the bucolic country.  We were not Norman Rockwell types.  We were Alfred E. Newman types, with tooth gap grins whose proud stance was, ’What, Me Worry?”

We had Leon Grocery gumption and snow simply brought out the very dumb and best in us.

Going home at the end of the day, having gone completely  unsupervised and free to roam like rabid dogs bonded in tribes whose phantom thread was either our skin color or religion, we would have to do a Gypsy Rose Lee worthy striptease outside our apartment doors, because there was no way that our mothers were going to let us drag in anything that would soil the sterile bubble universe that was our homes.  My house shared the same atmospheric conditions of your everyday average surgical theater.  My mother surely loved Mr. Clean as much as or even more than my dad.  I swear, late at night, she did Mr. Clean shots.

My mom used to clean like she worked the fields at Tara.  At the end of the film, instead of grabbing a fist full of dirt, she would raise a bottle of Lysol and declare,  “I will never go dirty again!”

So we re-entered the house naked and ran straight to the bathroom where a tub of lava water was waiting to scorch us to death.  I remember having to take an hour, to just dip my toe into the scalding water.

Three hours later my ass would finally hit the bottom of the tub.   It seems like bubbles were more vigorous in those days.  I remember creating hats, beards, and at time ingesting them, which was probably penance for saying “shit” or “fuck” during the day.

After the bath, when you at this point, resembled a Hiroshima victim, you were suited up in theme pajamas and with your hair slicked back like the Tyrone Power, you headed, all rosy cheeked and scalded to the dinner table which was always a Kim Jung Unworthy pageant of carbohydrates and starch.   

My folks, who had Eastern European roots,  just loved their BREAD, their POTATOES, and their MEAT.  My mom’s recipes always came from the back of Campbell Soup cans (Meatloaf was chopped meat and alphabet soup) and that is probably why both my sister and I by age 2 and 4 looked exactly like the roly-poly apple-cheeked and morbidly obese Campbell Kids.

In those days we were force-fed prisoners, who were only released from the table if we had finished a meal that Orson wells could not get down.   I remember friends like Stuart Shapiro who would pass out, face down in their plates, after their five-hour no hunger strike.

Being fat meant being healthy.   The desserts that we then consumed in our invisible feedbags, from the kitchens of Nabisco and Drakes, would today, come with a giant warning label that reads,  “Consuming these cookies will shorten your life bytwenty-fivee years.”   But back in the day we didn’t just eat one or two.   

We ate the entire bag.

We never once said,  goodbye Mr. Chips Ahoy.   We were a blue collar family.  My richer friends ate Pepperidge Farm cookies and to me, when I ate at their houses, it felt like those were the mini cakes to the Gods.  This was fancy.

Which brings me back to this very moment.   Man did I ever just time commute.  i was a Gone Boy,.

But now, here I am, sitting in my sweats, in my sixties instead of living in the sixties.  The big difference is today we do meds.  in those days we did DRUGS.   We would go from Dr. Jeckyl to Mr. High in a heartbeat.

In those days it was all about escape.

Today it’s all about  your ability to maintain your sanity.

But outside my window is the very same snow that fell on me once upon a time, years ago and that is why, in the end, it feels like a rather grand reunion.

Sure it’s easier to live in Florida or LA (which I did for 25 years).

But in those places you are assaulted by a staggering level of sameness.

The weather report could easily be an endless loop like those zen meditation app videos on the internet.

If you are drunk in Florida, telling which gated,  tan-colored community with a fountain that you live in is an impossibility.  

I don’t think I can live in a place where the museum that you go to most often is a Publix.

Plus in both places the traffic is like the kind you see during the mass evacuation scenes of a Dwayne Johnson disaster movie, who always seems to zip around with ease as if traffic isn’t a bumper to bumper nightmare.

Because it so disruptive and BIG,. East coast snow provides a huge behavioral service for me and I will bet for you too.  

It serves as a reminder for me to slow down.  

To recalibrate  my heavily conditioned, habitual path.

To breathe.

To reflect.

To time travel back to a mind place which allows my multi-mittened  inner child, who is usually way too confined and tormented by life, to peek his head out like Punxsutawney Phil and finally re-emerge once again.  

To romp and to roam free.

In my winter wonder fantasy land,  there is street hockey to play,  ice rinks to spin on, wind Gods to defy and fantasies to be ice sculpted.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.