In Praise of Snow

I was on the bus today and walked past a man carrying a full-size ironing board. It made me think of New York, where people are always lugging stuff like that around on public transportation.

I have been feeling homesick this week, with all the talk of blizzards back East. In NY, a snowstorm was always a community event—it instantly unified the entire city.

There's nothing like that here—no real sense of community (to me at least). Maybe it's different when the Lakers win the NBA championships (or the Dodgers win the World Series, if that still happens). But probably not even then—at least, not in the same way.

Now that we live in LA, I often compare NY to the traditional four-year college: the one with the big quad in the middle of campus, which everyone crosses on their way to and from classes. And if NY is a college, Manhattan is the quad.

No matter where you live in the NY metropolitan area, you probably pass through Manhattan with some regularity—maybe even every day. There's a critical mass there—lots of other people passing through or sticking around, lots of places to go and things to do. If you're headed there for one reason, you'll end up finding another to extend your visit. Maybe you go in for work but stay to go to the theater. Or you have a doctor's appointment and go shopping on the way home. Or you run an errand, bump into a friend, and go out for a drink.

Even if you're based in Brooklyn or Queens or New Jersey—the equivalent of living off-campus—you still find yourself on the quad all the time. And you run into people all the time. And you have a vibrant, thriving community.

By contrast, LA is like a commuter school, where people get into their cars, drive to class, and then drive home.

There's no quad—or if there is, it's typically deserted. That's what downtown LA is like. It should be a hub, but it's not.

You rarely run into people out here, and even getting together by design is a challenge. LA is enormous, and people are spread all across its sprawling neighborhoods.

Traffic and parking make it undesirable to try to see friends across town. And that's where they always seem to be: across town.

In NY, Manhattan is generally acknowledged to be the most desirable place to live (resources permitting), so there is almost a centripetal force at work. If you live "off campus," you are naturally pulled toward the quad because there are so many people and so many things to do there—the critical mass beckons.

In LA, some of the most desirable places to live are at the edges of the "city"—out along the ocean or up in the hills—so you have a centrifugal force that keeps people in their homes and creates a vacuum in the middle. No "there" there is right.

People on both coasts think I'm crazy to be pining for a blizzard. But it's not just the snow I miss—although I do love seeing NY blanketed in white, with kids sledding in the park and adults snowshoeing down the city streets. And I do love the peacefulness of the scene, the amazing quiet of the snow-covered nights—because it's such a change from the everyday hustle-bustle-jostle-tussle that is NY.

But what I really miss is the solidarity of shoveling the snow from the sidewalk amidst my neighbors . . . of ducking into a bar where we can warm up by the fireplace surrounded by other shivering souls . . . of savoring a snow day and then trading stories about it the next morning, once we bundle up and cross the quad and see each other again.