Grant

This year is, of course, the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. One of the two men most responsible for preserving the nation was murdered before he saw the victory. The other died in poverty and whenever I walk past Grant's Tomb not far from here or when I think about courage, I think about Grant -- the Grant of this picture -- dying of throat cancer in the summer of 1885, the cancer diagnosed the winter before, and racing in great pain and no longer able to speak to complete his memoirs so that after his death his family will not be penniless. Leave aside the question of whether he was a failure at everything he tried except saving the Union (personally, I think he was possessed of a restlessness that drove him in and out of successive endeavors or that he bored easily of a settled life), but you still have to be astonished at two things: that he was able to write those hundreds of pages in such pain and that he had to, when these days completing a presidency is a Go card to piles of money.

Urban Snowscapes

We woke to a couple inches of snow, which is supposed to change to sleet and rain for the rest of the day. I feel like this will be the last measurable snow of the season. Of course I always feel that way once we reach Presidents' Day and spring training has started. Last or not, it afforded these two urban snowscapes. The second was going to be a picture even before the snow, the result of wind and the eternal plastic bags meeting barbed wire on our very gusty Saturday two days ago.

Detritus

Temperatures have struggled above 40 the last couple of days and, while it still covers the parks and other green spaces, the snow along the streets is pretty much gone. Alternate side parking regulations began to be enforced a few days ago and on the first day the merciless ticket writers did something like four times the average amount for a winter day.

Gone too are most of the trash and recycling bags that hugged the curbs, buried under or sitting on top of the piles of snow. What's left is the odd detritus. Many Christmas trees still along the curbs, particularly on W.79th, most of them with needles remaining green from being buried in the snow. And what kind of mentality is it that makes people less inclined to pick up after their dogs when there is snow on the ground? Makes for a huge yuck factor when the snow goes away; makes many more people checking their shoes as well. Also you have the hundreds of cigarette butts outside Manhattan School of Music (students there have to be the largest subgroup of smokers left in the city); single mittens and gloves in the middle of sidewalks, in the middle of streets, amidst the melting snow (if I had started counting when I saw the first one, I'd be up to several dozen by now. Citywide the number has to be in the thousands), bottle caps, old coffee cups, and -- in at least one case this afternoon as I was walking home from the B/D stop on 125th -- prom pictures. Some kind of story there, surely.

The groundhog may not have condemned us to six more weeks of winter, but it already feels interminable on the spirit of the city.

Cleaning the Box

I have this big old wooden box, just like the In and Out boxes that used to sit on some of my desks in the years I worked, where I keep papers that need to be attended, in one way or another. As with the career days, some things just kind of sift to the bottom because I feel no time, or the time is not ripe, to move them. Today I came across one of those -- an appreciation by NYT critic Michael Kimmelman for Thomas Hoving, who preceded Philippe de Montebello at the Met and who died in December 2009, right before my own health issues. I liked both Kimmelman's writing and the Hoving it portrayed. Kimmelman said Hoving "believed that art museums were public repositories of wonderment....he wanted people to feel that same outsize thrill he felt standing in front of a picture, that...rush that comes from knowing something is terrific." I guess I kept the piece because I was then staggering each time I revisited the Waterlilies show at the MoMA.

Kimmelman ends the appreciation by recounting his first contact with Hoving, in the mid-80's, and Hoving's wish that the public feel a sense of both privilege and adventure when entering the Met. He writes of marveling after the meeting that New York "was the most amazing show on earth and thinking that a life fully lived should be a joy ride." And so New York remains, even as we collectively slip, slide away on the frozen streets and sidewalks of this long winter.