As I got my tea at the deli this morning a guy on the line kept leaning over to peer out the door.
"Want to make sure my bike's still there," he said.
"You didn't lock it?"
"Couldn't find the lock. Hell, took me an hour this morning to find the bike!"

Welcome to New York, we're having a strike.

Blowing across the sidewalk in a brisk wind: a subway and bus map, annotated and in French.

Down by the river: a woman my age on what has got to be her son's skateboard, pushing along, keeping her balance, with a triumphant gleam in her eye.

Interviewed on the news: a woman waiting to be picked up by friends on 97th just north of the 4-in-a-car restricted zone. "I've been here ten minutes and five people have offered me rides. Everyone with two or three people in their cars is looking for strangers to pick up so they can get past the checkpoint!"

I love New York.

This strike is bad for a lot of people, starting with the Transport Workers' Union members, and especially the merchants who depend on Christmas sales. It's a pain for those of us who have to put off meetings, or seeing friends who came to town for the holidays and are now stuck wherever they were last night. But it'll be over, and New York will survive, and be more New York than ever.

I will say this, though: it's my belief that those silk-suit creeps on the MTA board, headed by the King of the Stinkers, Peter Kalikow, deliberately pushed the union into this strike -- and the union fell for it. Internal union politics likely made it difficult for them to find another way, but this strike could destroy the union. The MTA would love that, because for one thing the TWU is widely considered one of the most militant unions in NY, and they irritate the board, distracting them from their mission of stealing and wasting money. And the MTA has other unions to deal with, whose members work on the LIRR and Metronorth. So if they hold the line against the TWU, what hope do those guys have? At Metronorth they've been working for three years now without a contract. You think they'll get one if the TWU caves?

I support the union and the strike, partly because I'm a knee-jerk left-wing liberal, so any of you who were going to write and say that, clam up. And partly because I'm on the side of anyone who's opposing Peter Kalikow and the MTA board on any issue, any time. But I wish the union had had a little more in the way of strategic brains. Imagine this: the TWU calls a press conference and announces that the MTA is not negotiating in good faith, that a strike is inevitable unless a deal is reached. But, they say, we want the people of New York to have a good holiday season. So we're unilaterally postponing the deadline. As long as the MTA continues to come to the table, we'll keep working. If there's no deal by January 3rd, we'll strike then. Merry Christmas.

How great would that have been? The union would have come across as real heroes, and the MTA would have lost any last inch of moral high ground they'd been clinging to.

But it didn't happen that way, so now we have a transit strike. I remember that last two. We coped. We'll cope with this, and eventually get back to normal. And until that dirty bomb that permanently empties the city, or the thousand-year earthquake that flattens it, I love New York.