Sunday Morning. Coming Down.

Sunday morning at around 1AM,
When the street belongs to the cop
And the janitor with a mop
And the grocery clerks are all gone. 
Sunday morning at around 1AM, just a couple of hours before Sparkle my two-year-old golden retriever decided to nuzzle me awake for good, a Greek-tragedy of a snowstorm decided to visit upon New York and much of what's left of the fast-fading untied states of americacocphony. 

By the time Sparkle and I had bundled up against the howl and the single-digits, the snow was already being cursed at by doormen and porters who have to handle its heft, and cabdrivers who still have to work and laughed and giggled at by children with caring parents who tote sleds and cocoa to whatever in Manhattan resembles a hill.

We walked out onto the street closer to six than to seven and started to make our way to Central Park. Dogs are allowed off-leash there until 9AM, and there's usually a pretty decent coterie of well-dressed people in expensive winter coats watching their dogs with one eye and their phones with their other. 

But this morning the slip was too much with us. The salt on the sidewalks--not from salt bagels--but to melt the ice, was already, in half a block, bothering Sparkle's paws. Quickly, we did a one-eighty and headed instead to Carl Schurz Park. The park is just 400 yards from my carpeting and though it's only 14.9 acres, compared to Central Park's 843, there's a fenced in dog-run there that serves my purposes and Sparkle's.

Roald rolled with the Arctic punches.

Getting there, of course, would have been a test for an Amundsen or a Peary. The sidewalks were like a carnival slip-n-slide, and each street corner was piled high with snow that had been shoveled from somewhere else and be-ribboned with slushy slurry of indeterminate depth. Slogging through it all, the ankle-high snow, the shin-high drifts, the Lake Baikal-deep puddles left me covered in sweat and fairly gasping for breath. 

However, this is New York, the city the never sweeps.

Growing up when I did, the ConEd guys would put up signs at their job sites. "Dig We Must," they read. And there's hardly ever been and never will be a better slogan for the city I love.

24 hours later, 92-percent of the sidewalks are cleared. At least three-lanes of five-lane avenues are clean and one-lane of each cross-street. Even a fair portion of the corners, where the disposed of snow is dumped have been canalled out, so there's a passage way through hip-depth accumulation.

Cabs are cabbing. Buses are elbowing. And Toyotas from Jersey are running lights and stopping in crosswalks. 

In an "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" sort of manner I started thinking about how the cities we live in reflect the people we become, or maybe vice-versa.

Nothing stops New York from moving. Even more than a $19 Timex watch, the city takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. 

I've lived, really, in just three places in my life.

One year in San Francisco.
Two years in Boston.
Sixty-five years in New York.

Each city, I suppose, like each person you meet, has their own ways of dealing with the vicissitudes of life. That's a fancy way of saying, we all have to play the hand we were dealt. Fairly or unfairly. Or a combination of those circumstances.

When I think of my long life--and 45 years in the ad business--through agency life, and now my seventh year of running my own agency, I think about muscling through the bad times. Working no matter what. Doubling down on what I do well and showing up every day, come hell or hot water, with ideas, what-ifs, ways-in and maybe something no one else has yet thought of. When I think about this blog, somehow I find something to write about even when I have nothing to write about.

That's the New York in me.

Switching gears, but only just a bit, it's been a tough time for the few remaining Jews of the world. There are fewer of us today than there were one-hundred years ago. What's more, Jew Hate seems to be having yet another moment. As they say, Anti-Semitism is a light sleeper.

In fact, according to the FBI, anti-Jewish hate crime is higher than its ever been and though Jews make up just two-percent of the US population, 70-percent of all recorded religion-based hate-crimes have been perpetrated against Jews.

Just now I was once again in the snow-filled Carl Schurz park with Sparkle. She wandered off and visited this snow person. I noticed that instead of coal, this snow person had Hannukah gelt, gold-foil coins, for eyes.

Somehow that seemed a symbol of New York, a symbol of being Jewish, a symbol of strength, endurance, survival and humor. A symbol of taking a licking and ticking ticking ticking.