No, I Think The Birds Know What’s Up

It’s the Metropolitan Diary editors who are a few weeks early. And the city’s haiku writers are jumping the gun:

This Daylight Saving

This hour gained, but empty, hushed

No one told the birds

Meta Metropolitan Diary: Just Add Kids

Metropolitan Diary jumps the shark:

On a recent Sunday afternoon the following scene unfolded on an uptown bus: A mother, her sons (each about 6 years old) and their aunt boarded the bus. The boys sat with their mom across from their aunt. The dark-haired boy began a continuous complaint about wanting to take a taxi, NOT a bus. This tirade continued for several blocks, prompting the light-haired boy to cross over and sit with his aunt.

Finally, the aunt spoke up and said, “Henry, there’s someone on this bus listening carefully to what you’re saying and on one of these coming Monday mornings, we will be reading about this scene in the Metropolitan Diary.” Smiles crept across both boys’ faces.

Who knew your fans included 6-year-olds

There Is No Metropolitan Diary Without A Crosstown Bus

Take the ubiquitous crosstown bus and cellphone combination and inexplicably add an opera singer and you’ve got the latest Metropolitan Diary:

My daughter, a social worker at Bellevue Hospital Center, was returning to her apartment on the crosstown bus after work. It was crowded and noisy — a situation not helped by one woman’s loud cellphone conversation.

In exasperation, one passenger began singing opera in an effort to drown her out. This did not help matters. The chatterer, whose volume rose steadily as she competed with “La Bohème,” explained to her cellphone buddy: “It’s a little hard for me to hear you; someone on my bus is singing.”

Gentle Reminder

Today’s 61 degrees (so far!) serves as a gentle reminder of how out of touch Metropolitan Diary can be. See, in particular, today’s “January Lament”: “The weather shows it’s not July/and empathy’s in short supply.”

Has this person ventured outside in, I don’t know, the last 30 days? Because it’s not just today — the Sun reported on the warm weather — this January is one of the top ten warmest ever — back on January 11th:

In Midtown yesterday, it was evident that the recent bout of unusually warm weather is beginning to affect people’s perceptions of winter.

Some wore scarves but not jackets; others discarded all the trappings of the season and simply wore T-shirts.

Not that yesterday was a record breaker for warmth: The mercury in Central Park topped out at 49, 6 degrees above normal but 11 short of the record set in 1876. Monday was the record-setting day, when the temperature climbed to 60 at La Guardia Airport, shattering the record of 50 set in 1998.

. . .

So far this year, temperatures have dipped below freezing only three times, according to the National Weather Service. Normally by January, the jet stream is blowing cold air from Canada through the steel and concrete canyons of the city.

“Typically, by this time of year, things have shifted around where the northern branch of the jet stream has taken over, but that hasn’t happened yet, and it doesn’t look like it will happen soon,” a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, Adrienne Leptich, said.

Instead, warm air from the west and south has kept temperatures high. Warm days are expected for the rest of the week, with the warmest weather coming Friday, when temperatures could reach 60.

Metropolitan Diary Shorthand

Nothing especially snarky to say about today’s Metropolitan Diary (What? Snarky — us? Never . . .) except that a deft turn of phrase in one of the anecdotes unwittingly (or perhaps wittingly — these New Yorkers, so meta and smart about shit like that!) reveals new shorthand for the feature itself: “All was right on East 88th Street.”

For posterity’s sake, here is the full anecdote:

Dear Diary:

I am the secretary at the Church of the Holy Trinity on East 88th Street, and on the Saturday of the recent blizzard I was helping with last-minute preparations for a party that evening for our departing interim rector. I was also worried that far fewer people than expected would come because of the snow and anticipated wind.

I stepped out on the porch of the parish house to take a breather and delight in the snow-covered dogwood and magnolia. Three corpulent (or very bundled) well-into-middle-age women came up the walkway. One was in a wheelchair. I was prepared to tell them that our Saturday Thrift Shop closed at 3:30, but they went away from the building, onto a path that even on good days is difficult: It is narrow, it has slate tiles, and it meanders. Why, I wondered, were they pushing a wheelchair on this path in this weather?

I got my answer when they stopped in front of a snow-covered bench. On the count of three, two of the women helped the one in the wheelchair up and plopped her on the snow- covered lawn. She sat upright for a couple of seconds, then lay down and started to make a snow angel, flapping her “wings.” After much giggling, the other two women helped back in her wheelchair. Then they plopped onto the lawn and made their angels. More giggling. Lots of it.

The snow kept falling. The people came to the party. All was right on East 88th Street.