A Christmas card for New York

So what do you do on a Sunday in December that feels like April?

Go get the car washed!

Which is exactly what I did today, among other sundry chores. The folks at Mr. Bubbles'—don’t you just love that name?—always do a great job, and now my 2003 red-and-white Mini Cooper looks like she did the day she left the showroom.

That is, if you don't look too closely at the roof. No car escapes 2 years of parking garages in New York City without scars, and mine is no exception. Tilt your head a certain way and you can see a row of small dents on the roof over the driver's seat. I was always puzzled how they got there until one day another urban parking veteran told me, "The attendants park the cars so close together that sometimes they have to walk on the roofs to get where they're going."

That's the way it goes living in the Big Apple. No person or thing escapes the city unscathed. And New York is utterly remorseless about it. In a strange way, that's one of the things I miss most about living there. When you’re a resident you learn fairly quickly that if you can't roll with the punches, dust yourself off and get right back in the ring, you’re not going to survive because no one is going to string up a safety net for you (excluding, of course, the trust fund crowd). New York teaches you the hard and necessary truths of self-reliance. And those who choose to live there wear that lesson like a badge of honor. It’s part of the hard-won camaraderie all New Yorkers share.

The dents in the roof of my Mini aren’t the only things that got me thinking about the Big Town today. Right now I’m listening to a radio broadcast of Handel’s “Messiah,” live from Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, and it sounds bloody magnificent.

Yes, the city is of necessity an unforgiving place, but there’s grace there too. In the voices now singing Handel’s “Messiah.” In the rush of people moving through the main concourse of the always-majestic Grand Central Terminal at 8:33 AM. In the soup kitchens and homeless shelters where resident volunteers turn their concern into action. Even in the subways where just last week I saw an elderly man give up his seat for a young pregnant woman.

“No one has to tell me how I feel about this town,” Bob Dylan told the cheering crowd at Madison Square Garden in November 2001, during his first concert in New York City since 9/11. I know just what he meant. And it always comes back to remind me in December.