Ramble, While a Little Bit Cold

It isn't cold very much anymore here, in New York City, where I live. When it is, as it was today, the cold becomes preoccupying, not just for me but for lots of people, the other parents at school drop-off, the people shivering on the subway platform, waiting outside the library for it to open, walking their dogs. It becomes a topic of conversation, an easy in if you want one, a time-filler if you need one. I found myself telling an elderly woman waiting to buy a newspaper while I was waiting to buy a cup of coffee/handwarmer all about how I had to unpack the heavy-duty winter artillery. I found myself listening to a man my age on the train this morning tell his friend all about the plane tickets he had ordered for an impromptu trip to Miami Beach motivated by his walk home the previous evening.

It's funny how cold, the sheer fact of it, can displace all of the other thoughts in your head so you find yourself walking down a street, focused on your breath freezing in puffs in font of your face, thinking only of how cold you are, in a way that might be almost like meditation. It's really not that interesting, being cold, but coldness has this way of becoming all-encompassing, to the extent that even this evening, several hours after I returned home from the day's last venture out into the cold, I found myself remembering how cold my hand was when I took off my glove to rummage in my bag for my wallet eight hours earlier, remembering the way it felt to be cold. Which I think one does primarily to subconsciously revel in one's current state of warmth.

What I think of when it is cold, now, when it is cold like this outside, which it so often was when I was growing up in Massachusetts, is the radiator wall panel in the upstairs bathroom in my childhood home, which to this day blasts hot air periodically when the heat's turned high, which it generally is when I am home. Even now, although I am pushing perilously close to 40, and my parents have had their house to themselves for nearly twenty years, there is a silent battle with the heat controls. I tiptoe down and turn it up. My mother tiptoes in and turns it down. And ultimately, at some point during my visits home, I end up with my back against the bathroom wall, my bare feet pressed against the hot metal grating in a way that crystallizes the fine line between pain and pleasure, until I am warm enough to venture back to bed.