Snow Day!

Is there anything better, in New York City or elsewhere, than waking up to a world covered in snow? Because that’s what I’ve got right now, luring my eyes away from the computer screen and over to the window: big dark leafless trees limned in white, cars blanketed, an extra degree of stillness on a Saturday morning. And the flakes keep flurrying.

As placid as the scene may be, I know it won’t last. Though the temperature should stay low through the day, ensuring the snow doesn’t instantly melt away as it’s done all too often in recent years, people will soon emerge from their apartments, walk back and forth on the sidewalks, and turn a fair amount of the snow to gray slush.

But not on my corner! Because as soon as I’m done writing this essay, I will be out there shoveling the sidewalk. This is no mean task. While your typical Brooklynite might have 25 feet or so of sidewalk to clear off, we live on a corner, so the members of our self-managed co-op are responsible for shoveling at least four times that. It’s an endeavor. But it’s an endeavor I love. Obviously, I love the physical exertion, and I’m in decent enough shape that I don’t worry about having a heart attack and dying, as something like 100 Americans do while shoveling snow every year, according to a study that sorely needs to be updated.

I also love doing it well. Some shovelers will clear a path barely wide enough for one person and strewn with clumps of snow; it’s the bare minimum required by law. By 9 a.m., you can spot which buildings have absentee landlords—or just bad landlords—by the sloppiness with which they’ve handled, or not handled, their walks. Our corner, however, gets cleared properly. I make sure to shovel a wide swath, from the fenced-in corral that runs along the building to the tree beds bordering the street, plus a wider area around our entrance gate. I even clear the curb cuts, and I do my best to really get down to the pavement, and to shunt out of the way those little blops of snow that keep straying back onto the path. It helps that we have a good shovel—I think it’s this one—as a bad one, with a weak haft or gnarled lip, can make the process excruciating.

I do all this because this is how it should be done. This is what shoveling snow is. If you’re going to be sloppy or lazy about it, then you’re not really doing the thing you’ve set out to do. You’re doing it solely because someone has nagged you to do it, because you fear a ticket from Sanitation, because you just want to get it ove—

Oh! Cool! A huge wind just came along and blew massive clouds of snow off our roofs and off the trees, and it swirled around for a good few moments before dying down. Neat!

—r with. I get that, but if you’re going to do something—if you’re going to put on the hat and coat and gloves and dig the snow shovel out of the basement at 7:45 on a cold Saturday morning—you might as well commit to doing it properly. Does Sisyphus get his boulder merely halfway up Mount Tartarus? Does he ever reach the top realizing he’s forgotten the boulder entirely? Nope! He needs to do his job fully in order to triumph over it. He’s no slacker.

But I also believe that you should shovel well out of pure altruism. A clean sidewalk is not just required by city laws—it makes life better and easier for everyone who passes by. They won’t slip, they won’t have to pick their way through a half-assedly shoveled walk—they can just go on through without a care or a thought, except, I might hope, this one: What a conscientious homeowner must live here! Okay, and this one, too: I will try to be like them!

Which is my larger point today: It is important to do things in our daily lives to make other people’s lives easier. God, that sounds so dumb and so plain and so—yeesh—positive, but there it is.

These don’t have to be big things. We can’t all be MacKenzie Scott. But we can do small things to make life less annoying for our fellow citizens, especially here in New York, where life can frequently be annoying as fuck. We can shovel the walk a little better. We can try not to walk more than two abreast. We can step out of the way of other people, or “pull over” to the side when we want to look at our phones, rather than scroll-stroll blindly onward. I like the idea of not taking up too much physical space in the world: How compact can I become when I’m out there, how unnoticeable? The place I want to take up space, of course, is in your brain, where I’m definitely staking out whole city blocks of territory.

When this works, when we’re all doing it together, it’s beautiful. I’ll go down and see other people shoveling, all of us neighbors engaged in an activity that, yes, is mandated by law but that we can approach with enthusiasm: We’re making our block nice, and for little other reason that we live there and want it to be nice for everyone. It’s not just how New York City functions—it’s how the city survives. We have a thousand tiny ways to take care of each other, to show a modicum of consideration for the 8.5 million other souls who occupy precisely the same space we do, and it just takes a small bit of effort in the right direction to do so. Remember Jon Stewart’s 2010 “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” in which he showed a video of traffic merging to enter the Holland Tunnel? I don’t know if I buy his political metaphor here, but seeing people—strangers!—take turns like well-behaved preschoolers fills my bitter old heart with joy.

Which, naturally, brings us to alternate-side parking, the bane of many New Yorkers’ existence. For those who don’t live here, it’s a system where, once or twice a week, you must move your parked car for 60 to 90 minutes so the street-sweeping vehicles can pass by, scooping up all the litter and leaves so that the city will be ever so slightly cleaner. Not clean, of course—the filth here is generations-deep—but cleaner. Some car owners choose to roam around for the interim, but most of us double-park, ideally directly across from the spot we’ve just vacated, so that we can return to it immediately after the sweeper drives by. And then, well, we just sit in our cars until the no-parking period has almost fully elapsed. This is the unwritten rule: If you are in your car, you will not be ticketed. But if you leave it, you run that risk.

What this means is that you have a good chunk of the block engaged, twice a week, in a communal activity designed to keep our street clean(er). When I lived on the Lower East Side and we briefly owned a car, everyone would move their vehicles, then emerge from them to chitchat… in Spanish. I watched and listened and wished I could speak it, or talk about baseball or some other common guy thing. But before long, we’d given the car away, and it didn’t matter. Now, in Brooklyn, we all mostly sit in our cars, though we know each other’s makes and models as well as we do our faces, and once in a while a loquacious neighbor will wander from car to car to gossip about the block. It’s nice, and I bring my laptop and do work and take meetings, and it’s easy and it gives me some hope for the future. Not a lot of hope, but a little, and that’s often all I need.

I can’t go, however, without telling you about this one guy yesterday who screwed it all up. He was clearly not from the block—you could tell that as much from his parking as from his outfit: He was a Hasid. And he was right in front of me, trying to figure out where to double-park. On one side of him was a big open space—with a fire hydrant. On the other, and slightly behind, was another car, a Zipcar with New Jersey plates that was sitting in the to-be-swept lane. Afraid of getting a ticket, but unaware of the distance between his car and the Zipcar, he managed to park himself pretty much right in the middle of the street. And then he committed the real cardinal sin: He walked away to conduct some kind of business elsewhere. That meant that once the street sweeper had gone by, and everyone else moved their cars back to proper parking spots, his car was blocking the street. Normal-size cars could get by, slowly, but vans and pick-ups and commercial vehicles were stymied. They approached, honking and honking, assuming the driver would nudge himself out of the way, but of course there was no driver. With extreme care, they rolled between his car and mine, and no one got even a scratch. When the clock hit 10:53 a.m., I figured I’d done enough and went back to my apartment; I never saw him return to his vehicle, so I never got a chance to tell him how many people he’d pissed off.

I, however, was not one of them. Maybe once his poor parking and thoughtless abandonment of his vehicle would have infuriated me, but no more. We all mess up, especially in unfamiliar places and situations, and I could understand his conflict: If he’d moved the car closer to the fire hydrant, was he risking a ticket for that, too? (I told him from my window that no one tickets for that during alternate-side, but oh well.) Instead, I chose to shrug. So be it! Why waste my energy being mad at him? I need every bit of it for today: That sidewalk won’t shovel itself. 🪨🪨🪨

Read Yesterday’s Attempt