I stopped by the grocery store on my way home the other day (see, I’m just going to jump right into this and pretend like nothing ever happened, and just see what does happen). The snow was already high enough to make you consciously lift your feet a little higher than you normally would with every step, and to plant in the back of your mind a series of questions on low-grade permanent loop: “Are my shoes leaking? Are my feet wet? Am I going to get a cold?” Maybe winter is tiring not so much from the toll of cold on the body as from these little mental and physical gestures it imposes on you. An inefficient way of interacting with the world. It was still snowing and everyone who was walking about was leaning forward a bit, torso bent into the wind and head bent to get the eyes out of the snow's line of flight.

In the past, part of the shock of coming back to America—especially when I’ve come back to New York, where there are lots of people out on the streets and everyone is a talker—is the sudden effortlessness of understanding everything everyone is saying. The first couple of weeks, the United States appears to me as an all too comprehensible cacophony. I can’t block out the woman with her cellphone standing to the side as I walk by¹ or the father with daughter walking just ahead of me for a minute before I pass them² or anything, really, and I end up writing it down on scraps of paper or whatever notebook comes to hand, because all this stuff that I am suddenly aware of seems like the mysterious meat of everyday life revealed suddenly, for two weeks only, until I get used to it and stop hearing it. That’s my side of it, the washed-out ears of new arrival, but there’s another side which is other people’s reactions: suddenly finding myself in a place where people don’t assume that I can’t understand what they’re saying.

A couple of guys were walking slowly in front of me out of the grocery store parking lot, talking to each other from the far sides of the chunk of road they were on. I walked through them with a nod as they were chatting. A second after I passed, one of them started saying, “Man, rush hour gonna be a --” before stopping abruptly. There was a moment of silence as I advanced a few feet farther ahead of them, everything moving in slow motion because of the piled-up snow—even the silence seemed to move in slow motion. When I’d gotten about five or ten feet in front of them—just as far as you’d need to get to mark yourself as potentially involved in some other social interaction, just too far to be plausibly involved in their conversation—he repeated in the exact same tone but in a very slightly diminished volume, “Man, rush hour gonna be a bitch.” Like a chord at the end of the movement, resolving the ambiguities; very satisfying.

1 “Oh hi, I’ve been meaning to call you but it’s just been crazy crazy crazy. So how are you? How’s the movie biz? Israel was great; great great great great great. Have you seen the new stuff from Casanova yet?”

2 Girl: And they got up with the sun
Man: That’s right, and
G: and they went to bed with the sunset
M: and they had lunch
G: when the sun was directly overhead
M: well, I don’t know, when they got tired
G: when the sun was directly overhead, and they
M: they woke up because a—well, this may just be in then fairy tales, I don’t know—but they were supposed to wake up because a rooster crowed, but I don’t know
G: they got up with the sunrise.