When we had the big snow in New York on January 25, 2026, I went out to frolic. It snowed the whole night and it was still snowing. No one was out. I couldn’t see the steps, the snow was up to my hips. No one had shoveled, the coffee shops were closed. It snowed like it used to in my hometown in Sibiu in Transylvania, the “snows of yesteryear” in the Carpathians.
My first big snow was in New York in 1967. I built a snowman with my neighbor and we made snow angels that filled up the minute we got up, and then we had a snowball fight in the middle of the street where no car was to be seen.
A happy man walked out of the building next door twirling his house keys on a finger, and singing. A snowball aimed at me missed and hit the happy man’s hand, causing his keys to fly from his finger and sink into the snow. We all got down to dig where his keys had disappeared, and dug for an hour trying to find them. We didn’t. After an hour all of us, including the man, gave up. He was not a happy man anymore, and we felt like juvenile criminals. The man walked away sadly in the ongoing blizzard, and he may be living on the street for all I know.
For the next big snow, I was in Gothenburg in Sweden, contemplating an ice castle at the bottom of a hill, reachable by ice steps invisible in falling snow. On an ice bench two teenagers were kissing. The Russian poet I was with took a step to where the stairs should have been, slipped and fell thirty feet down on the ice castle, making a loud thump when he crashed into an ice tower. The teenagers on the ice bench stopped kissing for a second when they heard the thump, then resumed. They were locals. The Russian poet clawed his way back up, shook himself free and limped away.
I always forgot how happy I was every time the first big snow came, and how badly when it ended. This time there was no one on the street except for one man walking toward me, talking on an iPhone. We waved and I passed him. Then I heard him talking on the phone in Romanian.
You can hear 167 languages in one borough in New York, but Romanian is rare. I turned around and walked up to the man. “Are you from the Carpathians?” I asked him in Romanian. He was stunned for a minute, then said, “Where are you from?” I said, “From Sibiu.” He said on the phone in the same language, “Simona... you won’t believe it.” Then to me, “I’m from Sibiu.” Being from Sibiu is even more rare than speaking Romanian, because people there also speak German and Hungarian. And here we were, neighbors in Brooklyn.
What’s more, he was talking on the phone with Simona, a high school friend he’d met again at the 30-year reunion of the high school, G. Lazar, which I also attended, fifteen years before them. It was snowing in our birthplace, too, Simona said from across the Atlantic ocean.
What were the chances? I should have bought a lottery ticket. I should go back in time a half century and look for those lost keys again. A door opens in time if you walk out in the First Big Snow.
The man wrote his first name and phone number on my iPhone. His first name is Horia, so I named him Horia Zăpadă (Snow) in my address book. He walked away still talking to his snow friend.
We had coffee yesterday.
