Gotham Diary:
Immer mehr Schnee!
Even the snow is tired of falling. It hangs, floating in midair, drifting every way but down. Or so it seems.
Snow or no, I must go out today. I must go to the Post Office, my least favorite place in town, not excluding the colonoscopy clinic. If you could see our post office — it’s called “Gracie Station,” but all grace ends with the name — you’d understand; it is one of the dreariest relics of Fifties functionalism that’s still standing. A blank barn of a room with too much fluorescent lighting and counters that look as though they’d been thrown up in an emergency, the place makes you wonder if Joe Stalin didn’t win the Cold War, after all. Because this is a place where you expect to have your papers examined by petulant and capricious clerks who might just for the hell of it dispatch you to a gulag. I won’t say that the post office clerks are nasty, but you can’t wonder that they hate working there. It doesn’t help that the neighborhood’s affluent citizens rely on their office mail rooms, setting an Emma Lazarus default on the already cheerless atmosphere.
And I’ve a yen for Shake Shack that nothing else will appease. This is just the day for sitting outside, no? I think, if I get there early enough, there won’t be a crowd and I’ll find a table inside. But I never do get there early enough. That’s to say that I don’t even try, because by the time I’m ready to leave the house it’s too late.
I hope that the snow isn’t spoiling Will. Who knows when we’ll have so much again? Not that we played in it on Sunday, when I took him for a walk. We watched the dogs in Tomkins Square Park, coming and going (completely different crowds), trudged down Ninth Street to St Mark’s Bookshop, comme d’habitude, and stopped at Dinosaur Hill on the way back. When he is in the carrier, strapped to my chest, Will doesn’t interact with the world very much, although this week he did give the dogs some attention. But the moment he was planted back on the floor, back at home, he made a beeline for the front door and beamed at me with Harpo-Marx intensity.
Something else that he did that was neat to watch: he was playing with something at the table that was not food. At least twice, I saw him push it to the edge but then stop pushing. He’s done the gravity thing. For half of last year, he broke me up by staring down at things that he’d just given the heave-ho to, as if his special eye-power would levitate them back up. He appears to have tired of that experiment.
Now, if I can just throw on some clothes really quick and get out of here…
… success! Shake Shack was super, and I had a table to myself the entire time. I read Matthew Gallaway’s The Metropolis Case while I nibbled away at a Shackburger, krinkly fries, and, of course, a chocolate shake.
But was I trying to make predictions about how awful the post office would be? Three windows were open: one for special delivery and supplies, one for stamps and money orders, and one — just one — for all the other things that you have to go to the post office to take care of, because they’re cumbersome and time-consuming. The minutes flew by like hours, without anyone in the entire joint moving more than an inch in any direction. Just one. But it got done.