Transit Strike Day #2: Routine

December 21, 2005: 11:00 PM
R. D. Kushner

NEW YORK CITY - It was cold today. Not unreasonably cold, just the kind of cold that gets into your thick winter clothes and sits like an itchy blanket next to your skin. The sky leaked sunshine all around, but none of it seemed to soak into the streets, where it might collect into warm pools at intersections. Today was the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice; the northern hemisphere of the earth turning its face away from the sun as if avoiding a kiss.

The city was unusually quiet; at least the small variant grid that I traversed by foot. You can’t get very far by foot, not in the cold; with your thoughts wrapped up tightly in a wool hat and your hands bound by fleece gloves. Madison Avenue could have been a cross country ski trail in the middle of the wilderness if it hadn’t been for the canyon of buildings cutting the ground into measurable slices. The traffic was diverted away from this urban artery and the automobile was relegated to slicing through it on cross streets; I saw a taxi maneuvering quickly out of sight like a stealth gondolier.

The walk was about two miles. I had to consider this earlier in the morning. You see I am in the habit of going to the gym before the sun rises and orchestrating my legs to a steady rhythm on a tread mill. Such an activity becomes habit forming after not too long, and in spite of the inevitable walk ahead of me to my office, I couldn’t resist the addictive allure of a few miles of perspiration; repetition and habit are comforting.

I feel the effects of my persistence as I stride nimbly from sidewalk to sidewalk, across intermittent rivers of asphalt. The cold oozes into the soles of my shoes as I catch a glimpse of a falciform moon hanging in the sky next to a fifth floor window. I can’t remember the last time I looked at the moon with such intensity. This morning, it defied the daylight, allowing the blue backdrop of the sky to mingle into the contours of its subtle frozen seas. I looked at the streets around me and wondered if eventually the real estate of the moon would be tortured into such treacherous steel and glass monuments.

The tide of pedestrians flowed from all directions as if the Cartesian grid had conceived of them instantaneously; the birth of man, the garden of Eden, mythological beasts, a mass Exodus from the warmth of the hearth to the cold extremities of the imagination, an ideological archipelago perched precariously along the eastern seaboard of a geologic feature suffocating slowly under the weight of its own ideology.

My routine has been disrupted and my habits plowed under a furrow of earth. The seeds of thought lie germinating in frozen soil. Warmer weather and chronological tradition guarantee a lengthy but worthwhile gestation. In the mean time I walk among anonymous companions, creating new patterns for old habits.