The good folks at WNYC News ran “six months after Hurricane Sandy”-themed programs yesterday, and they were kind enough to invite me to contribute.
Here’s the truth: I kinda sorta miss Sandy. Not her destruction of beloved homes and property, no, of course not, nor the inconvenience of driving around an hour for a viable gas station. And don’t get me wrong – I love hot showers. And cable TV. And the Internet. Everything about the modern world, I love.
But at the same time, didn’t it feel like we were all in this big, horrible mess together? That we were in a crisis, and people were going out of their way to be extra nice? Take my neighbor, for example. Great guy, but waving from afar is pretty much our relationship. And yet there he was, knocking on my back door after our neighborhood blacked out, offering the end of a very long extension cord that ran from his generator. His mother-in-law lives next door, so he had to share his juice with her, too, but that didn’t stop him from gifting us with a few sparks of his electricity.