On Saturday night they announce that I may be trapped in my apartment with both my kids for two days of cancelled school. Talk about natural disasters.
Sandy is “barreling” up the East Coast, set to “crash” into New Jersey a few hundred miles south of my living room, with a “left hook” sea surge that threatens to flood a lot of Manhattan. “What floor are you on again?” my friend Jon asks from Buffalo (which, unbelievably, will also feel Sandy). Nine, I reply. “Should be just high enough,” he replies, “to hail a passing Coast Guard cutter.”
Then I do what doomed the Donner Party: I forget to buy bread. “Jeff, a storm is coming!” Jill informs me. “People buy out everything. What else do we have to get for this stupid storm?” To further embed her in a pissy mood, the organizers of the Pumpkin Sail – pumpkins with candles inside launched on boards in the nearby Harlem Meer – cancel the annual Halloween event. Jill was looking forward to taking pictures and posting them on Instagram.
“There’s not going to much left to buy,” says Ned, heading out with Jill. He would’ve been great on the Titanic. “I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to my office on Monday,” says Jill, as the disasters continue.
Irene was just 14 months ago and a bust as disasters go. Wind and rain, and I stepped out at noon and found birds looking for food. No bird is going to look for food if a hurricane is coming back. The sea surge stopped about five inches short of flooding South Street Seaport. All of this annoys me: We don’t live in a quaint seaside town where we can walk the beach easily. We live in the hardest Manmade place on earth, trying to scratch out something in the lower middle class. I moved here from Maine so I wouldn’t have to care about the frigging weather.
If they do cancel school, maybe we’ll sleep late. Maybe not: Alex has a racking cough that is more or less entering its second week and won’t leave him alone, and I wonder what’ll happen if the power goes out (Batteries!) and leaves the neb machine dead.
On Sunday afternoon, as Sandy closes in, Ned and I go to a bar – he’s spent a surprising amount of time in a bar for an 11-year-old – watching the Redskins’ loss to the Steelers. With Ned, I had the best time ever at a loss – at least until halftime, when the news buttinskis confirmed that NYC public schools will be closed on Monday. Ned and I stop in the wine store on the walk home; it’s quaint to stock up on bottled water and milk and batteries and yadda yadda yadda, but we have kids.
