Quick geography lesson: The United States is a really big place and not all of it has the same weather. For instance, if you leave Florida where it’s a balmy 80-plus degrees in March and set out for New York City, you’ll likely find that flip-flops and T-shirts won’t cut it. Unless, of course, your idea of Manhattan is hypothermia and a frostbitten toe falling off.
Here in Florida spring is in full effect. It’s warm out, the leaves are an eye-tingling shade of green and there’s so much pollen on the ground that you have to shovel the driveway just to get your car out in the morning.
New York is in no such disposition yet. The trees are still barren and temps are straining just to reach 50 degrees during the day, and dipping into the low 30s at night.
I was in the city for a college media conference where someone had the bright idea to let me critique student newspapers. They didn’t know that I like to ramble on and make wild analogies that cause people to suspect I’m drunk. “Now this page looks to me like oatmeal,” I remember saying at one point to kids who nodded their heads like they understood what I was talking about.
Anyway, when I wasn’t inside nice warm conference rooms I was outside wildly roaming the city and experiencing “temperature shock” — that scientific phenomenon that comes when Southerners like me who dread opening the freezer door get transported to cold climates where they sometimes die from cold attacks.
Part of me does love the cold — big, heavy leather jackets and walking around in gloves and fancy sweaters. How the tip of your nose turns red and feels like someone smacked it with a tennis racket. That sensation you get as you step from bitter cold to the warm comfort of a heated building. I live for that thrilling shiver that runs up and down your spine. How good a cup of hot tea tastes, or how running your hands under a particularly chilly faucet can make gray hair pop out of your head.
I was fortunate enough to be able to take my daughter along with me. She had never seen snow before, and I was determined to find a bit — if only a bit — somewhere in that great city. Even though temperatures had warmed to the 40s, 50s and even higher since then, I figured something had to be leftover from a brutal storm that slammed New York just a week or so ago. Just a smidgen or a dollop for a kid to stare at in wide-eyed amazement would be enough. It could be the size of a bird dropping and she would be happy.
Somehow I found it as we walked through Central Park the afternoon before the conference. It was the most gnarly, ratty, ill-kept, low-life, unhygienic, nasty clump of dirt-bag ice ever to infest civilization.
Most people wouldn’t have even recognized it as snow. Gravel, yes. An oil spill, yes. A mound of cold, oddly-shaped elephant dung, OK. But certainly not snow. The poor, miserable blob of slush looked like it needed to be put out of its misery by a good blast of sunshine. Played with? Not if you didn’t want salmonella and dengue fever.
But when you’re a Floridian, snow is snow whether it’s the more genteel white and fluffy stuff prancing about in the air or this hunk of grimy, grungy half-frozen ice.
“SNOW!” I screamed, and we ran to it.
We made the most of our find, brushing off a three-inch crust of filth until we uncovered what looked like a gray snow cone. I wondered what flavor a gray snow cone would be. Tuna? Ground beef? It was a mess. But my daughter was enthralled and demanded that we begin rolling snowballs for a snowman. So there amidst the New Yorkers who must have thought we were mad, or just dirty people, we constructed a little snowman that might have registered 5 inches tall with two gravel eyes and a black, bent twig for a nose. It was glorious, and our hands burned from the ice. The snowman looked like a homeless W.C. Fields.
When my conference was over we came back to the 80-degree weather, quickly shedding our coats and cranking up the AC. Back to flip-flops, T-shirts and clean ice kept comfortably in the freezer. But part of me is going to miss it, although it’s probably the part that was infected by that dirty snow.