This is a perfect beautiful night between
you and
me, babe, no one else. There are no ghosts riding us right now, no
phantoms of past lovers or future heartbreaks. Just you, and me, and the snow coming down as we leave the
theatre. A few days into
the new year, and we’re both still
dressed to the nines and my head is so full of the chants and exultations and pure unadulterated joy of
la vie boheme and we have to leave
Times Square because the snow is falling. It’s only the fourth or fifth time I’ve seen
snow since I was a little girl and we’ve never, neither of us, been here before, and the lights from the signs wash over us, and the
flakes catch and refract the light off
a thousand glowing tubes of neon, and
we’re both so busy looking up with our mouths open that we’re almost hit by a car, and we agree that there’s only one place to go when you’re out on the town and snow is falling.
Central Park, baybee.
Trying to decipher the
map, plan our route, and I’m secretly fearing that when we come up out of the underground the snow will have stopped and this perfect crystalline moment will be over before it even got started. Getting warm and toasty on the train with just enough time to appreciate it before we sally forth into the cold again,
winter coats pulled tight. A
playground made all of one unit of poured concrete, all strange
art deco angles and shapes, and I’m trying to get you to sing the
McGowan part of that old
Pogues song, and you only halfway remember it, so our version is a little bit shaky. One huge piece of
granite, jutting up out of the frozen ground, slick with ice, me trying to climb down it to get to the path and falling on my ass despite the
sensible shoes and you making so much fun of me.
The Tavern on the Green still has its 2003
piece on the patio, each number carved out of ice, leftover from the revels a couple of days ago, and we stand in front of it and try to calculate the logistics of stealing a zero or a two to take back to
the compound before we realize that this would require Work, and that
we can’t be having any of that. Coming up on the
Imagine plaque in
Strawberry Fields, covered ever so slightly in a dusting of snow, with
roses scattered on it, and that is the moment when everything transcends, transforms from merely fun and great to become singular, perfect, magical. This is a night to treasure, to put up on a shelf and take down from time to time and polish and use to light up my self whenever I can feel it getting
dingy and tarnished and grey.
Drunken twins or cousins or something terribly precious on the subway platform, from somewhere
out of town and so just as lost as us, and you’ve had a few more
adventures with the rails than I, and so know how to tell them how to get where they’re going, even though they’ve been drunk for 3 days. You ask me where I want to go next and the simple answer is Someplace Warm. So it’s off to
Grand Central, so you can show me
the Vault of the Heavens, all the
zodiac picked out in little light bulbs 50 feet up. Although I never realized before that the Heavens would be such an interesting shade of
turquoise. And down
42nd, there’s this little all-night deli with more delights than I’ve ever seen all in one place before. Cocoa and a
chocolate in my belly and
black coffee and cigarettes in your hand to brace us against the increasingly bitter night outside, with the talltall buildings forming wind tunnels,
crosshatching the currents to strike you just so on a street corner and blow right through you. It has stopped snowing by this point, and on the train back out to
Brooklyn I put my head on your shoulder and close my eyes and try to fix it all in my memory.
It couldn’t all possibly be real. This is the sort of thing that only happens in
stories.