Where are you going?

It’s the calm before the storm here in New York these days. It’s what you can’t help but see when you walk the streets and see the lost discarded Christmas trees all lining the sidewalks, the bright hopeful glow of their lights gone, leaving them naked and exposed and without a home. From the Village to the Upper East Side - their time has come.

I finally took mine down tonight, a project I’ve been meaning to tackle, but like all things you don’t want to deal with, I put it off until what felt like the last possible minute. So I struggled alone, hefting it out of the apartment and out on to the street to join its outcast friends, leaving nothing behind but a trail of dry browning branches on the floor.

Now there’s nothing left to do but settle in for this next leg of winter that is about to befall Manhattan. The Chill is here and we don’t want to leave our apartments in the morning or venture outside to return to them at night.

What I want to know, is what The Chill means to the man who sleeps in front of the church on 72nd and 2nd, who every time I walk by asks me, "Where you goin’ fine eyes? You goin’ somewhere good?" And every time I pass him I smile and resist the urge to tell him that I’m not really sure where I’m going, or if it’s going to be any good - but I figure that at least that I’m going home, whatever that means, and how we all forget (oh, how easy it is to forget) that as bad as things can become, (and boy can they get bad), we’re not as lost as a discarded tree out on the sidewalk, all alone in the cold.