I watched the sky as icy crystals began their descent from the clouds to my hair. All the world slowly became transformed, a sea of powder covering mailboxes and apartments as far as the eye could see. The bright billboards felt even brighter as the snow reflected their light. It was the biggest blizzard New York City had seen in 10 years, but the streets were not filled with the usual cacophony of noise and panic that comes with a storm. Instead, there was a quiet, unrelenting joy stronger than the wind rustling through the leaves of Central Park’s trees.
I was in Circle in the Square Theatre when I got the notification that my flight back home to San Diego was canceled due to the storm. I was 2,400 miles away from home, but I couldn’t think of a place I would rather be than New York City.
My best friend and I had just watched one of our new favorite Broadway shows, “Just In Time,” featuring Jonathan Groff. Before that, we went to Soho and saw the Washington Arch, listening to a man play piano in its shadow. This city holds a kind of magic that can’t possibly be put into words. There’s an electricity to it that I don’t think the greatest poet would ever be able to summarize. The 20 inches of snow just made it all the more magical.
From 9 p.m. on Feb. 22 to noon on Feb. 23, all roads and subways were closed. So outside my hotel room, around midnight, there was a kind of silence I had never realized was possible in such a loud city. There was nothing but the falling snow and giggling tourists trudging through sludge.
We stayed inside until the snow stopped, entering into this camaraderie that we had watched from the window the night before. It was like all of New York City had slowed down to appreciate this world that had turned so beautiful overnight. There was a symphony of laughter as tourists tried jumping over icy puddles while others threw snowballs. Bryant Park became something like an outdoor museum with everyone’s homemade snowmen on display.
It was unity and beauty in a time when those things often feel so hard to come by.
Thousands of miles away sat Point Loma Nazarene University, where I should’ve been sitting in class and catching up on a mound of homework. But as much as I love my school, I think the world is a much better classroom. You can’t learn the importance of wonder and awe from a textbook, but it’s so apparent when you see the falling snow and lovers holding hands. It makes me think that despite everything, this world is a beautiful place.
“This can only happen right now, in this room, with you,” Groff said in the concluding monologue of “Just in Time.” “And it’ll never happen quite the same way again. It’s already turning into a vapor, a memory. Be here now. It’s all we can do.”
For a few brief moments, it felt like all of the chaos of the world was diluted by the snow, by the sounds of a piano in Soho, and by watching my friend’s eyes light up at all of the paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. I breathed in the tension of the present tense, holding beauty and pain tightly in both hands. Because that’s what storms do, don’t they? Both the literal and metaphorical ones. They help us see what truly matters — they remind us to be present because who knows what’s going to happen next.
I finally made it back to PLNU on Tuesday, Feb. 24. The air felt warm against my skin, the lights dimmer than I thought they would be. It was as if the snow and the countless billboards on Times Square were something from a distant memory — a vapor, as Groff called it. But I will never forget the feeling of the falling snow, of thinking that for one short moment, the world might not be so bad after all.
“Here is the world,” Frederick Buechner once wrote. “Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
Tessa Balc