I've been living in New York for some time now, comfortably separated, working a bit too much - as a refuge, I suppose. Dating just seemed weird, and I stopped looking for companionship years ago, just happy to stick to my routines, politely accept the dates that my friends set up, and otherwise enjoy my solitude.
Then, out of the blue, I met HER, in the deep freeze of the coldest winter we've had in decades. What a crazy city this is.
As you know from the news, it has been horribly cold, and getting colder. So cold, in fact, that last week Mrs. Laurel Robinson, 45, of Scarsdale, New York, froze to death one night after getting locked out of her home while looking for her cat. Her husband had long ago been banished to a second bedroom because of his snoring, and didn't realize she was outside until the next morning.
As the anchor on the local news intoned in an appropriately somber and deep voice, this tragic event turned a cold winter into a season of death. That night the temperature dropped to ten degrees overnight, and the next morning Ms. Robinson was found frozen in her backyard.
So you get the picture. A week ago this past Tuesday it was four degrees. As I left my apartment in Manhattan for the 30 minute walk to my office, gusting winds were stirring up the salt and ash that had been liberally spread on sidewalks to fend off slip-and-fall lawyers, much as garlic was once thought to deter vampires. Deter the bloodsuckers! I left at the usual hour, the wind stinging my eyes, my mouth half hidden by a scarf.
The last three or four weeks it has been so cold that I've been wearing whatever I want to the office - jeans, old brown shoes, a long wool coat like a western duster, collar turned up, and an Irish fisherman's sweater that smells like a sheep. If I were a woman my colleagues would cattily hiss behind my back and say "She's given up, poor dear, just LOOK at those shoes, it is so sad (cluck cluck), if she only TRIED a little bit..." Instead, I imagine I come across as an insouciant Ralph Lauren-like executive of a certain means and age, with an accenting touch of grey at the ears. Though I could be wrong.
And so I trudged down Broadway, my eyes stinging, and as I walked my nose began to run - my sinuses have been hell for weeks. I was sniffing, wiping my eyes, and finally I couldn't stand it anymore, I cleared my throat and spat.
Garlic may not truly ward off vampires, but other old adages are true. One should not spit into the wind. Yes, even me, for as you know I'm trumpet player - I have awesome lung volume, and could suck the air out of a Macy's balloon float, or blow down the little piggies' straw and twig houses, maybe even their brick house too if I huffed and puffed enough. If I were the more vulgar type, I might be dominating my age category in the Spitting Program International Tournament (SPIT) (50 and over, non smoker), riding from one venue in the Ozarks to another until I had no more room for trophy-spittoons on my mantle.
But you see, some folks have to learn the hard way. I was always the kid who, when the sign said "no this, that, or the other thing permitted" would immediately do whatever was prohibited to see what would happen. I needed to know why, always.
Now some people don't spit at all - they think it is gross. I guess it is a question of your circumstances and upbringing. The Japanese, who are forever spitting everywhere, think that our habit of expelling snot balls into hankies that we carefully fold and put back into our pockets is gross. They have a point.
Other people spit, but not on the crowded sidewalks of New York. If your aim is off by a few degrees you could hit somebody, and they might respond by beating you to death with their bare hands, a trash can, a newspaper box, or by pushing you into a careening taxi driven by a Egyptian emigrant who has never driven in ice and snow before. I myself have no reservations - under duress, I'm a spitter.
You might think I was being particularly dim, or something - I mean, everybody knows that you shouldn't spit into the wind. I guess I wasn't thinking, or the whole thing was too distracting - the cold, the grit in the air, my runny eyes. We all know that the reason we don't spit into the wind is that, well, it comes back at us. But there's more to this story. Much more.
The reason we don't spit into the wind in winter when it is four degrees with a wind chill of twenty five below is not only because it comes back at us, but because it freezes so fast you can almost hear it, crackling faintly as physics and chemistry and other science stuff happens and the liquids you expelled at approximately 98.6 degrees return as an irregularly shaped, jagged little three dimensional polygon.
And so it did. It came back at me, right in my face. This is where you can say "Eww",but it more or less bounced off of me, like hail and icy rain will.
I cursed and kept walking down the street, bumping into a few people who were off balance from the unaccustomed, poorly distributed weight of six layers of clothes. As I walked I felt my ears and cheeks start to burn from the cold, and thought about putting on my gloves, but I hate gloves.
I was about halfway to my office in the Financial District when a woman stopped in front of me, blocking my path, and said to me "Are you ok?"
I'm often stopped on the streets in New York. Three quarters of the people who stop me need directions, especially down here in the south part of Manhattan - the streets are built on old colonial footpaths, which were built on old Indian trails, which were built to track game along meandering streams long gone. It isn't like midtown - a neat, ordered grid of numbered streets - it is very confusing.
