Spring Has Returned, And So Has the Line

Matthew Elefant is a husband, father of three, and 20-year resident of the Upper West Side who spends much of his free time in Central Park with his family.

This has been a long winter.

My boots stayed on through March. My heavy coat and I came to an understanding somewhere around February that neither of us is proud of.

But it is over now.

The tulips are up. It is light past six thirty. The outdoor tables are back. Dogs that have been walked at a brisk get-this-over-with pace are now being walked at a this-is-the-whole-point pace.

I went outside. The city was magnificent. I had forgotten this.

I decided to mark the occasion the only way a New Yorker properly can.

I went to get an iced coffee.

There was a line.

Of course there was a line.

Not a small line. Not a this-will-take-two-minutes line. A line with ambition. A line that had been there long enough to develop its own social structure — the people at the front who had been there so long they had made friends with each other, the people in the middle who were on work calls as if this were a perfectly normal place to conduct business, the people at the back who had just arrived and were already lying to themselves about how long this was going to take.

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I waited. I got to the front. I ordered an iced coffee and a croissant.

And then the person behind the counter handed me a ticket.

A ticket.

I looked at the ticket. I looked at the counter. I looked at the croissant — my croissant, already there, already plated, sitting behind the glass approximately fourteen inches from my face — and I looked back at the ticket.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“Just wait over there,” she said.

Over there was another line.

There is a secondary line — a post-line, an encore line, a line that exists after the line — whose entire purpose is to stand between you and the thing you can see with your own eyes. Someone invented this. Someone sat in a room and said: you know what this experience needs? More waiting. And everyone in the room nodded.

I watched my croissant for the full four minutes. It did not move. Neither did I. We had an understanding.

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I want to tell you about a time when New York understood things differently.

I walked into a bodega on a weekday morning. There was a line — there was always a line, this is New York, there is always a line — and I was late, and all I needed was a newspaper and a drink, and I knew the price the way I knew my own phone number.

$2.75.

I had it ready in my hand before I walked through the door — the bills, the coins, the entire transaction pre-solved — and I walked to the counter and put it down and took my paper and my drink and I was gone.

Nobody stopped me. Nobody complained. Nobody required an explanation.

Because everybody understood. The guy behind the counter understood. The people in the line understood. There was an unspoken but ironclad logic to it: if you are not using the register, you are not using the line. I had done all the work at home. I was simply completing a formality.

This was a social contract. It was never written down. It was never explained. It simply existed, the way the best things in New York simply exist — understood by everyone who actually lived here, invisible to everyone who didn’t.

I still remember $2.75. I will remember it until I die. Not because of the money but because of what it meant — that this city ran on a frequency that rewarded preparation, efficiency, the understanding that everyone around you also had somewhere to be. We were all in a hurry together. That was the deal. That was New York.

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I drink my coffee black now. I want to be honest about this because I think it is important context: I do not like black coffee. I have never liked black coffee. I drink it black because black coffee is the only item in most establishments that defeats the post-line — that arrives immediately, without a ticket, without a wait, handed to you directly like you are a person with places to be. Which I am.

I drink black coffee every morning as a tribute to the city this used to be. It tastes like principle. It tastes like exact change.

It is the worst. I recommend it completely.

Last month someone I trust — and I am reconsidering that trust — convinced me to wait in line for Australian frozen yogurt.

I have questions about the Australian part that were never answered to my satisfaction. I was not aware that Australia had distinguished itself in the frozen yogurt arts. My understanding of Australian cuisine begins and ends with shrimp on the barbie. And yet here we were, on a sidewalk in the greatest city in the world, in a line I would describe as geopolitically significant, waiting for something I had never once felt the need for before this moment and have not felt since.

The line was so long it had developed its own workforce. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that the man in front of me was not there for the yogurt. He was there professionally. He had been hired to be there. By someone who could afford not to be. This, I was informed, is now a job — professional line standing — which means that somewhere in this city a person who used to write code, or practice law, has been replaced by artificial intelligence and is now making a living holding a spot on a sidewalk outside an Australian frozen yogurt establishment so that someone else doesn’t have to think about it.

The future of work. Right here. On a sidewalk in New York City.

I reached the front. I ordered. They handed me a ticket.

Of course they handed me a ticket.

I waited in the second line. I received the yogurt. I ate it standing up because there was nowhere to sit.

It was fine. Perfectly fine yogurt that was in no meaningful way different from yogurt I could have obtained without a line, without a ticket, without the forty five minutes of my remaining life I had just spent on a sidewalk in a city I used to understand.

It was fine.

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Spring in New York is beautiful. The tulips are up. The boots are in the closet. The outdoor tables are back and the light is doing that thing it does in April where the whole city looks like it was designed to look exactly like this and I remember why I live here and I forgive it everything.

And then I turn the corner.

There’s a line.

There’s always a line.

$2.75. Exact change. No ticket. No app. No second line.

I threw away the ticket on the way home.