Just when I decided that I may get myself a racket and join Jens playing tennis in Central Park, winter is here. So we took a walk. Something about these tennis courts resonates with me, with the strange mix of pleasure and sadness that can take your mind off mundane tasks and fill you with longing for god-knows-what. Snow was falling in thick flakes. Not much in the end, but in the city every bit of it seems to count as a snow storm. Once the snow is nicely on the ground and the sun is out again, the park will be crowded with kids and parents, riding down the slopes of hills on anything that resembles a sled. Every year, that’s a happy moment in Central Park, children shrieking with pleasure. When I was new in Manhattan it made me realize that, no matter how crazy this place may be, people are really not so different from anyone else. Yesterday, everyone still home during the ’storm’, was entirely different. Without the laughter and commotion of sled-riding, the realities of the neighborhood are more present, the cracks in the walls more visible. Walking back into the streets, I saw a row of empty stores with broken windows, no one bothering to repair things. And no lovely layer of white snow covering it up.
