Come on, Snow, Come Down from Sky. That's what he said.

I was headed into the grocery store to pick up snacks for Oscar night.

He was standing in front of the double doors, a silhouette against the flourescent lights of the store's interior.

He was wire thin, in his 30s, maybe, and wearing dark jeans, a winter jacket and black ski cap, skin darker than blue, his words thick with an island accent.

He was standing, hands at his sides, palms open and up toward the stars, his neck bent far back to turn his face to the sky.

His voice boomed, a deep baritone plea.

I looked up at the sky in spite of myself, like how could it not respond to such richness of a person.

Nothing happened. I smiled at him. He nodded in my direction. I went around him into the store. He went back to soliciting store customers for a ride in his gypsy cab. As I walked by, he mumbled to himself about feeling tired, and wanting to be able to go home.

I don't know the particulars of his situation, of why the onset of snow would allow him to go home. It would be hours before the roads got bad enough to warrant not driving. Maybe if it snowed he could justify to himself retiring early for the evening, missing out on whatever fares he might have left tonight if he loiters in front of the store until the 11 o'clock close.

Before I lived in New York, I lived an insulated life. I lived in a house, which I left every morning and got in my car, and drove to my job, where I worked in my office until I got back in my car and drove back to my house. I lived in a world of walls, barriers between me and the rest of the people in my town moving around in their own barriers. I know this now because here, in New York, I live among people. Being an avid pedestrian, I walk among people, rub shoulders with them (literally) on my way to work, whisper light brushes against their bodies walking down the street, hear snips of a thousand conversations every day. There's a different kind of intimacy, privacy here in the city, a privacy that incorporates a hundred bodies, a hundred voices in every space. I am struck daily by the beauty of people simply going about their business. It takes all kinds of people to make a city work; councilmen, dog walkers, fry cooks, teenagers, cab drivers, sanitation workers, doctors, window dressers, food cart vendors, nannies, real estate moguls, bank tellers, and on and on. A city's elite can only live by sharing the street with the blue collar workers who tend them. That's true of any cities, population 2 million or 2 thousand.

My mom recently sent me one of those forwarded emails that make the rounds, this one labeled an angry "HOW TO DESTROY AMERICA" just like that, in all caps. The long and short of this email was that our country is dying because of an influx of immigrants and a government that indulges them by adopting a policy of multiculturalism, valuing diversity over patriotism and tolerance over adaptation. According to the article, we are losing our national identity, and the loss is killing us. These points all made in much more offensive rhetoric than how I've summarized them here. I asked mom what she thought my reaction to the email would be. Rightly, she said she knew it would make me angry, and it did. I find such oversimplified, alarmist attitudes symptomatic of a kind of educated biggotry. The kind that points fingers at our immigrant populations and blames them for rising unemployment levels, health care costs and poor economies.

Here in the city, I interact with these people every day, all day. They are my clients at work. They serve me pretzels on the sidewalks and drive me where I need to go when I run late. They cook the food and mop the floors behind the swinging kitchen doors of my restaurants. They carry the boxes that contain the clothes hanging on the shelves of my clothing stores. They've also probably picked the fruit I eat when I buy it in the store, refinished the floor in my apartment when it was last renovated, stitched the knockoff designer bag the lady next to me on the train is carrying, sold me bootleg dvds, delivered my food when the weather has been too lousy for me to go out, and scores of other behind the scenes tasks I probably don't even know about.

Some of them work 14 hour days, live in 2 bedroom apartments with up to 8 people, send 60 percent of their income home to families abroad, or save their entire pay to bring more family members here. They do it without health insurance, paid holidays, sick days, life insurance, tax returns or vacations.

None of them are working jobs that I find myself sitting at home wishing I had, but most of them, like me, just want the opportunity to work and make a living.

As for the man I saw this evening who stood outside the grocery store pleading with the sky, when I came out of the store 20 minutes later, he was gone, and it was snowing.

I love how sometimes the magic of just wishing for something really hard works.

I love the sight of people in moments of true humanity, unguarded.

Humanity is what we all have, and it doesn't matter what state of affairs our "papers" are in.

The real destruction of America is in the forgetting of that very thing.  ¶ 8:26 PM