Here we go again.
New York hasn’t been able to make it through a week lately without a storm pounding us. And now, right on cue, another nor’easter is bearing down on the region. It’s the fourth this month, our own meteorological March Madness.
Go ahead, groan. We’re with you.
The poet T.S. Eliot had it all wrong. April is not the cruellest month. It’s March. It promises the arrival of spring, which supposedly started Tuesday, but it gives us the grim reality of an endless cycle of cold, gray misery. Day after day after 31 lousy days.
It’s not only the delayed trains and buses and the messy streets and sidewalks and the downed trees and the school closings and the alternate child care arrangements and the postponed meetings and the bulky clothes and dripping umbrellas on the subway and the unknowable depths of slush that must be forded or vaulted, though those are exasperating problems indeed.
It’s also the feeling that this is never going to end, that we’re stuck in our own Gothamist version of Groundhog Day, sentenced to suffering through an endless feedback loop where one bad-weather system breeds another and the shovels and ice-melt are never going to get put away and the T-shirts and shorts are never going to get taken out and the seeds are never going to get planted in the backyard vegetable gardens and pots and the polar bear plunges will never be passe.
The high temperature at Central Park on the so-called first day of spring was 38 degrees. On Dec. 21, the first day of winter, it was 39.
What’s that you say? You see crocuses pushing through the hard soil? Must be a mirage.
Wait, opening day is only eight days away? Ahh, time enough for the eternal cycle to renew. Baseball is coming back and deep down we all know what that means.
The Mets are hosting the Cardinals? Snowout.
