When I lifted the cutting board away from the faucet the wet wood emitted a striking odor—musty, winy—that immediately took me back to my childhood. But I didn’t know what it was it reminded me of. I was eight or nine, in our house in Storrs. What was it that smelled like that? Probably our wet cutting board.

On TV the race cars were under full-course caution because a cheap canopy and poles had blown onto the track. They type that always shade a table with credit card applications. There it lay crumpled on the edge of a corner as cars steered clear and a marshall waved his red and yellow flag.

On the first day of spring it’s been snowing all day and it’ll snow most of the night too. I like to be surprised by the weather but I decided to look. Here’s what the hourly forecast says for tomorrow: Mostly Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Mostly Cloudy, Partly Cloudy.

In the end there’s no way to really avoid surprises.

A rat scurried along the far wall at Canal Street station, looking like the shadow of my train pulling out.

We spend our lives avoiding taking care of others and then no one’s there to take care of us.

The red light signaling a new message on the phone on the empty desk in the vacant cubicle.

And here comes the snow.

It keeps supposed to be snowing. And it never really does. A flurry here, a flurry there, that’s it. Yesterday, today. The whole city waiting for it to happen. We’d like something pretty and white to cover up the mud and gunk from the last big storm, at least for a little while.

A dusting of snow fell last night while nobody was looking. In the morning you had to decide: Were those windshields clear yesterday? I suppose they were.

The Seventh Street crossing guard hasn’t been at her post lately. This morning I wondered: Does she stay home when it gets too cold? Did she get sick of it all and quit? Was she fired for letting someone walk against the light? Does she have pancreatic cancer? Has she coincidentally been on her cigarette break every time Jackie and I walk by? Or is she stationed at Sixth Street now?

F Train Conversation

I was slipping in and out of a reverie on the F train home. I perceived a woman talking. Where was she? I opened my eyes and saw that she stood right beside me where I sat, speaking to a man. They were both so close that I couldn't see their faces. But I could tell they were smiling from the sound of their voices.

She told a story about Sugarloaf, the ski resort in Maine. She loved it there but hadn't been in 13 years, she said. "Why not?" asked the man. A friend of hers—her best friend growing up, a man, a lover at some point—was up on the roof of his family's vacation house, clearing off the snow from the past night's storm.

"He fell from the—well, he fell off the roof."

"Jeez!"

"He actually managed to fall on the only part of the ground that had already been shoveled."

"No!"

I watched her feet and legs. One leg was thrust forward a bit; she put her weight on the other, with her feet at right angles.

"So he snapped his neck. And he actually got up and tried to start his car. He actually thought he was going to drive himself to the hospital."

"Huh! Wow."

"When they found him he had blood coming out of his ears and everything. They put him in a coma. It took him 18 days to die."

"Jeez."

"So that’s why I haven’t been back."

"Yeah. I can understand that."

"And it was one of those things where I meant to go up and see him before that, and I just didn’t"

"Right."

"He sent me an email, I didn’t answer it. One of those deals."

"Jeesh."

Her foot moved a little bit as she bent her knee.

"When I got married he was the one who told me it wasn’t going to work. I should have listened to him."

"Yeah."

"He said, ‘No, no. He’s not right for you.’"

"Yeah."

"‘He’s not for you,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a man. You need a real man.’"

"Yeah. Wow."

"I should have listened to him."

On the first full day of spring fat snowflakes fell between the raindrops.

Sophia cried and strained on my lap, batting away the bottle, convulsed by her mysterious forces.

Later I put her in the crib, tamping down her cries with shhhh, shhhh, shhhh. When she finally stopped I tiptoed away as if she were my house of cards.

Lightning flashed and thunder rolled and the snow fell relentlessly tonight.

Shoveling Snow at Night

I went out to shovel late at night, the snow all up and down the walk all soft and crystalline. I thought I must be alone; this is one of those things you do, you're all alone. But a cab was idling at the light up on the corner. I imagined the back door flying open, a passenger scrambling out, skittering on the packed ice in his dress shoes. With a gun. The cab departed silently. I put my shoulder down, hit the blade on a crack.

Another car, an SUV, pulled up from Seventh Street. A man got out the passenger side and walked up to a nearly identical car parked by the corner.

"Good morning," he said.

"Morning."

He, too, drove away.

In the distance, north on Prospect Park West, there was something going on. Blue and red lights pierced the lamplit snow. A few minutes later an ambulance drifted by on its dismal errand. That's about when I was done. I threw out one last handful of salt, kicked my boots against the wall and went inside.

I slept off the hangover from the baby shower but awoke woozy and out of sorts. We'd spent the day before at M. and A's, drinking, darting out into the darkening afternoon to smoke on the patio, snow swirling down between the buildings. We smoked pot and as I drank the world dissolved around me. Today I looked out the window: The snow had stuck but now the sun was shining.

Today the sun was shining strong above the roofs and through the streets and thick, white snow fell upward.

I lowered the shade beside my desk and returned my attention to the inviolable world of my desktop: Internet, e-mail. Word.

Tonight there was a noise outside my apartment door as of an aged imbecile in slippers, open-mouthed, pawing at the wall. Or of a drunken teenage couple just in from the cold, locked in their halting exertions, hands brushing nylon.

John and Jim and I returned from lunch down Greenwich Street today and I was under the impression we'd be swept straight off the island by a gust of wind. I suddenly felt myself susceptible to flying debris such as gargoyle fragments, billboard buttresses, windowsill pies, stoplights, wrought-iron window gates, hubcaps and wrecking balls swung free of their chains. I half imagined a parking sign cartwheeling up the sidewalk to plant itself in the center of my brain. Instead a fat man walked around the corner with his barely earthbound dog.

A squall came this morning, beyond the blind that had shaded me from winter's southern sun. Adam said, Wow it's snowing hard. I thought he was joking. But I lifted the bottom and peered out to find an excited haze of thick flakes, seeming almost in suspension.

Baseball's back.

The turnstile and the stairs, the thousand strangers and the stores, the streets and snow and slowly turning spheres.

In the sauna I sensed the unexpected heat of a stranger's gaze; before I knew it he'd opened his mouth.

"I've never seen a tattoo of a chair before."

"No, I guess not many people have."

He asked a few more questions, the typical asinine ones, how did that come about, were you drunk, what does it mean. I gave him my stock replies, not unfriendly though. After a few more minutes of sweating I prepared to leave and thought of what to say, should I say Have a good night? But I looked over at him and he'd gone palms up, lolling his bespectacled head in an earnest and showy display of meditation. I was off the hook.


Snow's been falling in wet flakes all day. They say six inches, eight. I cut across a somehow virgin blanket of it on 56th Street after meeting Eevin and discussing sex, relationships, her upcoming trip to Paris.

Remember when water fell from the sky in drops the size of grapes.

Snow sifted down upon the city in a blur. I walked over to Andrea's and on the way I stopped at the liquor store on 103rd and Park, right by the elevated Metro-North, right by the vacant weedy lot where inexplicably there's a sofa, table and two chairs. A husky-voiced drunk was ahead of me in line, buying a bottle of wine or brandy.

"You got a opener? For sale?"

"No sir," said the clerk.

"My man, can you do me a favor? Open it halfway."