Let it not be said that our snow-prayers were not granted.
Our New Years' Eve plans weren't fully baked by the time we struck out for the first party of the evening in Crown Heights. Mark and Lisa had just had a literal baby, but they went forward nonetheless with their party plans. We visited them in their new apartment in Crown Heights, and found the place decked out with various pickled Russian delicacies, along with several "salads" from Elza Fancy Food. Mark had warned us that Puck, their two-and-a-half-stone tomcat, had taken the birth of the baby hard. I'd laughed at Mark's description, but when we got there the cat was indeed moping on an office chair and staring at itself in the mirror. Nina cradled their new baby like a very delicate hero sandwich. I tried to distract Puck from his existential crisis, tickling him and cooing at him until he took a swing at me.
Our next stop was at Emma and Jay's in Downtown Brooklyn, where we watched the ball drop and rewind in Times Square several times over, using the DVR to broker our experience of the event. We left Emma's a bit after 1 AM, and I was still hoping that there'd be adventure in store. But Rubulad had been ruled out -- too racist this year -- and everything else we'd seen on the Nonsense List was heavily, heavily DJ-based. (Some kind of techno lock-in at The Bell House? Ugh.) The New Years' Eve landscape was barren, like when every rock band leaves the city for Texas during SXSW. So instead I made Nina come to Canal Bar and drink a whiskey with me at 2 AM, like Homer in that episode of The Simpsons where he out-eats the buffet.
The next morning we tried to re-create the pleasant exercise of last year's New Year's Day with breakfast at Abilene. They were out of fried pickles, though, and Nina's breakfast burrito had three hairs in it, which she removed and deposited on a napkin. She eyed them mournfully as she dismantled the remainder of her breakfast.
A few days later, the microwave broke, spontaneously arcing during an innocuous attempt to defrost an Amy's burrito. (Nina diagnosed a faulty waveguide cover.)
We got the first snow of the year on Friday afternoon. I was afraid it would be gone or trampled slushy before we could get out in it, but it held frozen through the next day, and so we were able to go sledding on Saturday afternoon. I went down to the basement to retrieve the big blue sled we'd bought around this time last year, dusting off the sprinkling of wood shavings that had accumulated on it (termites?) all the while keeping an eye out for rats or spiders amidst the filth and rubble, and ducking preemptively so as not to bonk myself on the iron underpinnings of the building.
We entered the Park at Third St. and headed towards the bright crest of the hill on the eastern side of the park where we could see a whole lot of fellow sledders practicing their sport. A group of kids called out to us at the base of the hill, asking if we'd share our sled. There were three of them, and as we talked to them it became clear that they had come to the Park looking to get some fun out of discarded sleds -- quite a reasonable proposition, although they'd come up empty so far, their best haul being an upscale laminated foam wedge with the lamination all scraped off so that it balked when you tried to make it slide across the snow. This had clearly been a major setback for their evening. We all traded off on taking turns down the hill in our big plastic dish, one by one and sometimes two by two, me riding piggy-back on Nina's hips. The kid who was in the middle by height and age had a fixed, dissatisfied look on his face and a generally dysphoric affect. He was the one who'd found the broken sled, and he was obviously disappointed, though he continued to strategize. "My plan," he told me as we surveyed the landscape from the top of the hill, "is to wait until some of these people leave their sled for a few minutes to use the bathroom, and then I'm gonna take it. They're going to be like, oh no, where's our sled?"
It occurred to me that this was an opportunity for me to shape the values of the next generation. "Won't they be upset that their sled is gone?" I suggested.
He didn't seem to hear me. "They'll be like, where's our sled?" he repeated. There was a pause. "Wait," he said. "Is that stealing?"
The center of Long Meadow actually stays pretty dark even when the lamps around the perimeter are on. So after you slide down the hill, your inertia carries you out into an enveloping blue-gray darkness from which you must trudge back towards the light and your friends. An irritatingly polite and cooperative Park Slope family had staked out a spot next to us. They included a tow-headed pair of eerily simpatico siblings, each armed with a vintage wooden sled with red metal runners and steering handles. (Flexible Flyers, maybe?) They were willing to let the boys try their fancy sleds but first they had to finish their own competition. "One, two, go!" yelled the girl, and they both took off down the hill, throwing their sleds down in front of them as they made practiced, fluid transitions from a run to a face-first descent into the meadow. At length we came to the final challenge, a small makeshift jump made of snow at the base of the slope. Nina made the first attempt, whooping as she got airborne. I took the next turn, making feeble yelps as I caromed off the snow-submerged curb and enduring a pelvis-thumping landing off the ramp. Nonetheless, I think I was legitimately flying for about a second and a half.
"Come on, man," said, the oldest boy said, exhorting his friends to follow us. "She did it." (Gesturing at Nina.) "And she's a girl! What's the matter -- You scared?"
"I'm not scared," said the middle one with the sour face. "My stomach hurts. Feels like I'm going to throw up."
Convenient, I thought. But Nina was laid low by a stomach thing a few days later, so maybe that was no subterfuge.
Afterwards, we ate dinner at The Olive Vine, stashing our snow- and dirt-encrusted sled at the front by the register. Our host seated us in the back, in the "heated bedouin tent" they'd created by draping carpets over a metal scaffold and filling the enclosure with electric space heaters. It was very comfy, and even though I'd forgotten to wrap plastic bags around my socks, thus allowing snow to spill in over the tops of my Doc Martens, my feet were soon dry. There was a clear plastic tarp at the back of the tent through which you could see the back yard of the musical school or whatever that building is to the west, full of withered bushes and frost-emaciated creeping vines. The yard was blanketed with untouched snow, but the heat of the tent had melted it around the perimeter. The mexican chocolate place next door is gone; the Thai fusion place is gone. The Olive Vine's menu doesn't change. I ordered the same zataar-and-zucchini pizza I've been ordering since 2003, back when the place was where you would take your parents to show them that you were doing okay and that you were gonna make it as an adult.