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There's an awkward pause that occurs when uninvited people come to visit you for no good reason, when everything has been said that anyone can think of, but nobody gets up to leave — it feels like the Valley of the Shadow of Death — so farewell sounds need to be made such as "Okay then" and "Yes, sir" and "Very good".
That was the beauty of the blizzard that transformed New York City. Airports closed, sanitation workers put in 12-hour days. Twenty inches fell in Central Park Sunday, so Monday was called a holiday, and the Park was packed with celebrants, sliding, skiing, hiking, dog-walking, and the snow was perfect snowman snow and impressive ten-foot ones appeared here and there, and snowballs were thrown though in a big city you need to think before tossing. But nobody said it was caused by Chinese satellites, or that it made it even more necessary to take Greenland. It was just a great blizzard that changed how everyone went about their business. We were all in it together. All of the various pronouns became one: We. Us. Ours. He/him/his didn't matter much.
A blizzard puts us briefly back in the 19th century and makes smartphones, laptops, earbuds, GPS, Alexa somewhat irrelevant, and you step outside and are back in olden days when women in long skirts go skating with gentlemen in homburgs, and all schoolchildren memorize the Gettysburg Address and Sir Walter Scott's
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Nowadays, fathers of teen girls tell me, it's Taylor Swift and if you are enlisted to drive vanloads of little girls to games and social events, you will hear them singing, "I was grinning like I'm winning, I was hitting my marks. 'Cause I can do it with a broken heart." Girls who've never been on a real date are big fans of breakup songs.
But out there in the snowdrifts in Central Park you experienced the eternal childhood that this old man remembers, same as my dad on the farm, my grandpa working in the shipyard in Canada, going way back to William Cox from Oxfordshire, a sailor in the Royal Navy who got tired of the lousy food, the rats, the perilous chores, the whippings, and he jumped ship in New Jersey, a capital offense, and came inland, started a family. His daughter Martha Ann Cox was my great-great-grandmother.
She experienced blizzards the same way we do. A time to set aside your plans, check your supply of provisions, stay home, keep warm, admire the splendor, and yield to the childish delight of tearing around having fun in the snow.
That's what was happening in Central Park Monday, New Yorkers in a state of delight. Hollywood gave urban life a bad rep: city streets at night made the perfect backdrop for crime and danger and the small town became the paradise of simple virtues. Well, guess again. You go to Carnegie Hall for Brahms's Second Symphony and sit in a blizzard of soulful rapture. And even if you were brought up by leftist hippies and suckled on Pete Seeger and nurtured on the Grateful Dead, you cannot help but be swept away — if you forget that this is Classical Music, if you sit back and close your eyes, the Adagio movement will sing you into a state of wonderment — even if you don't know a scherzando from a school bus, you will experience delight. You will rise with 2,800 other people of various faiths and predilections united in delight and clap and cheer, and then you will hustle outside to 57th Street and compete mercilessly for a yellow cab. This is an experience that everyone should have at least once.
So is a New York blizzard. Your life is not complete until you've seen one.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.
Who never to himself hath said,
"This is my own, my native land!"
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on some foreign strand.