TASTE: Warm arroz con leche on a cold winter night, Sunset Park

If, on a snowy evening, you find yourself in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, stop by the card table set up on outside Taqueria La Mixteca, across from the park on Fifth Avenue between Forty-second and Forty-third streets, and buy a cup of arroz con leche to sip as you walk. Arroz con leche, or “rice with milk,” is a Latin American drink of warm milk, rice, sugar, and cinnamon. It can also be served firm and chilled, like rice pudding, but I prefer it warm and sip-able, a hearty substitute for hot chocolate.

At Taqueria La Mixteca, the arroz con leche is made by Caroline, a middle-aged Mexican woman with wizened skin and smiling eyes. The taqueria is a nondescript storefront nestled among Fifth Avenue’s phone-card stores, fluorescent-lit hair salons, and bodegas—if it weren’t for the red and blue thermoses set up in front, you might walk right past it.

Most of the time Caroline can be found in the kitchen, where it’s warm, a black hairnet stretched across her forehead, frying up quesadillas in a haze of greasy smoke. She doesn’t speak English, but if you poke your head in, smile, and point to the sidewalk, she’ll bundle herself up and shuffle outside to sell you a cup of her concoction.

As she dips a tin ladle into the thermos and spoons the soupy drink into a Styrofoam cup, steam rises into the chill air. Walking along the street, ice crunching underfoot, cup the drink in your mittened hands and flip back the plastic top. The sweet milk will fill your mouth as the pieces of swollen, mushy rice slip down your throat and settle like a warm blanket in your stomach. It requires almost no chewing, just a slight pressure of the tongue against the roof of the mouth to flatten the rice grains, and the combination of nutty texture and creaminess matches the biting air and soft snow that blankets the park as evening falls.

SOUND: The G train Recharging at Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn

On a typical day, the G train runs from Court House Square, in Long Island City, to Smith-9 Streets, in Red Hook, mowing a green zigzag swath across the outer boroughs. After discharging its last passenger in Brooklyn, the G continues along the tracks to the 4 Avenue F train station, in Gowanus, to recharge before chugging back toward Queens.

I used to live near this stop, an elevated outdoor platform with sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty. But the sight I enjoyed most was the apple green circle at the front of the G train emerging over the railway bridge, its headlights dim. It chugs to a stop on the center track, sighs, flexes its brakes in rhythmic thrusts. It exhales a whoosh of pressurized brake steam, then shudders to stillness. The digital window signs still flicker from CROSSTOWN LCL to LAST STOP/SMITH-9 STS. There’s a metallic hum. The car lights dim. Sometimes a conductor moves through the cars with a broom.

Inevitably, an F train hurtles into the station, pings its doors open and closed, and sweeps out, hardly casting a glance at its hick cousin, who will never have its floors anointed with bags from Zaro’s Bread Basket, will never know the thrill of burrowing beneath the East River or the corner of Central Park.

But the G train has had a moment to collect itself. There is a clicking. The window signs go blank, then flash LONG IS. CITY/COURT SQ. The lights brighten. The train brakes suck in air as they get ready to roll. Folklorist Amanda Dargan claims that she hears the first musical phrase of the song Somewhere– as if singing “There’s a place for us” when this happens on the 4, 5, and 6 lines. But I can’t say as I’ve ever heard the G train sing.

The wheels turn over once, squeal to a stop, and rotate again with increased confidence. A shiver, then a grinding lurch. The pigeons that have settled on top of the cars scatter. The green G recedes against the skyline of a city it will never enter. It feels like--for a moment--I knew the G train, having witnessed its most vulnerable moment. But now it’s unreachable once again, like an old friend who’s moved on.